Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Zebras. Prekinetic study (Preliminary study for the kinetic theory. Graphic Period, 1929-1939) (installation view) 1939 Gouache, pencil, colour and white chalk on paper Photo: Marcus Bunyan
While on my European art trip in 2019, I ventured by tram to the deepest suburbs of Budapest to visit the Vasarely Museum on a Sunday – one of only three days the museum is open. The journey was an experience in itself. The reward was that I got to see an artists work I have always admired (I have a Vasarely serigraph in my collection), set in one of the most beautiful art galleries I have ever seen in my life. What’s not too like.
Critically, I got to examine Vasarely’s work up close and personal, on a large scale. I noted how gestural his work is, even as it is geometric – emerging from his Gesture Drawings. Ground Plans of 1946. There is a mesmerising flow to his compositions, even as they are supposedly set, fixed, in their mathematical complexity.
Even as Josef Albers explored colour in the belief that colours have no inherent emotional associations, so Vasarely investigated the formula for a “plastic alphabet”, a universal visual language based on the structural interplay of form and colour, a programmed language with an infinite number of form and colour variations. Through serialisation and the processes of re-creation, multiplication and expansion, “in pictures based on the mutual association between forms and colours, he claimed to perceive a ‘grammar’ of visual language, with which a set of basic forms making up a composition could be arranged into a system similar to musical notation… He regarded colour-forms as the cells or molecules out of which the universe was made.”
Don’t believe all that is written on the can. While both artists want to euthanise the authenticity of the hand, the feeling of he eye, and the beauty of the object through an investigation of concept, form and replication, when in the presence of these paintings, once, twice, three times, one cannot deny the intimacy of their construction.
Unlike flat reproductions of these paintings in books, their serial reproduction, in these installation photographs you can see the ripples in the surface of these paintings. Their meticulous, hand-crafted production. For example, look at the surface of paintings such as Lom-Lan 2 (1953, below); Marsan (1950 / 1955 / 1958, below); and Sonora(1973, below). From a distance their patterns are stable but optically disturbing. Up close, their surface dis/integrates into swirls and ripples at a molecular level. The musical annotation – colour, form, pattern, repetition – of these optical illusions is subsumed into an aura, an earthly divination of a transient ‘planetary folklore’.
View of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
View of one of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at second left, Gesture Drawings. Ground Plans (1946); and at second right, Composition (1948) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Gesture Drawings. Ground Plans (installation view) 1946 Pencil on paper Vasarely Museum Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Text from the Vasarely Museum website [Online] Cited 26/10/2020
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Hombre en movimiento – Estudio del movimiento (El hombre) Man in motion. Study of Motion (The Man) 1943 Tempera on plywood 117 x 132cm Vasarely Museum Budapest
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Composition (installation view) 1948 Oil on canvas Vasarely Museum Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
A journal for the development of graphic industries and related professions. Budapest, 1. 1920 – 13. 1932
Installation views of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest with in the last photo at left, Versant (1952) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Versant (installation view) 1952 Acrylic on plywood Vasarely Museum Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest with at right, Lom-Lan 2 (1953) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Lom-Lan 2 (installation view) 1953 Oil on fibreboard Vasarely Museum Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views on one of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing the painting Amir (“Rima”) 1953 (installation view) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Amir (“Rima”) (installation view) 1953 Acrylic on plywood Vasarely Museum Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view one of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, Orion noir (1970); and at right, Norma (1962-1979) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Orion noir 1970 Acrylic on canvas Vasarely Museum Budapest
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Norma (installation view) 1962-1979 Acrylic on canvas Vasarely Museum Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Chess Set 1980 Multiple, plexiglass Vasarely Museum Budapest Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of one of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, Marsan-2 (1964/1974); at centre, Gizeh (1955/1962); and at right, Marsan (1950/1955/1958) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Marsan-2 (installation views) 1964/1974 Acrylic on canvas Vasarely Museum Budapest Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Gizeh (installation view) 1955/1962 Oil on canvas Donation of Victor Vasarely, 1970 Vasarely Museum Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Marsan (installation view) 1950/1955/1958 Oil on canvas Donation of Victor Vasarely, 1970 Vasarely Museum Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Naissances (installation view) 1954/1960 From the album Hommage à Johann Sebastian Bach (Éd. Pierre belford, Paris, 1973. Éxemplaire XIV/XX), Supplement no. 3. Deep kinetic object, plexiglass, silk screen Vasarely Museum Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Zilia (installation view) 1981 Acrylic on canvas Vasarely Museum Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Stridio-Z (installation view) 1976-1977 Acrylic on canvas Vasarely Museum Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Tri-Axo (installation view) 1972/1976 Acrylic on canvas Vasarely Museum Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Seitz The responsive eye (book cover) Museum of Modern Art, 1965 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing Yllus (1978) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Yllus 1978 Acrylic on canvas Vasarely Museum Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Upstairs galleries
Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing V.P. 102 (1979) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) V.P. 102 (installation view) 1979 Acrylic on cardboard, mounted on plywood Vasarely Museum Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left in the display cabinet, KROA-MC (1969); and at centre, Quivar (Ouivar) (1974) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, Eroed-Pre (1978); and at right, Quivar (Ouivar) (1974) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Eroed-Pre (installation view) 1978 Acrylic on canvas Vasarely Museum Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Quivar (Ouivar) (installation view) 1974 Collage, gouache on cardboard, mounted on plywood Vasarely Museum Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at right, Stri-oet (1979) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Stri-oet (installation view) 1979 Acrylic on canvas Vasarely Museum Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left centre, Stri-oet (1979); and in the display cabinet, KROA-MC (1969). Love the reflection of the colours on the wall behind! Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing KROA-MC (1969) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, Bull (1973/74); and at centre left, Orion noir (1963) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Bull (installation view) 1973/1974 Acrylic on canvas Vasarely Museum Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, Bi. Octans (1979) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Bi. Octans (installation view) 1979 Acrylic on canvas Vasarely Museum Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, Kotzka (1973-1976); and at right, Trybox (1979) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Kotzka (installation view) 1973-1976 Acrylic on canvas Vasarely Museum Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Trybox (installation view) 1979 Acrylic on canvas Vasarely Museum Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at centre right, Vonal-Ket (1972/1977) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Vonal-Ket (installation views) 1972/1977 Acrylic on canvas Vasarely Museum Budapest Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at centre left, Sonora (1973) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) Sonora (installation view) 1973 Acrylic on canvas Vasarely Museum Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Unknown artist. Cover of the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art, National Museum of Victoria, 1952
I found this rare pamphlet in an op shop (charity shop). I have decided to publish it on Art Blart as part of a historical record, so that it is available to researchers into Indigenous Australian culture and art. While I believe that the text and images contain no information of secret sacred importance, if anyone has any concerns please contact me at bunyanth@netspace.net.au.
What is fascinating about the text is that it was originally published by the National Museum of Victoria in 1929, and then reprinted verbatim for this pamphlet in 1952. In other words, no new scholarship had taken place in the intervening 23 years that was noteworthy enough for the Museum to feel it needed to update the text. Other interesting facts are that Aboriginal Art was housed within the Australian Ethnology section, art as an outcome of the study of the characteristics of different people, and that it was known as “primitive art” made by “primitive peoples”. Even the National Gallery of Australia had a “primitive art” gallery up until the 1980s!
Of course, the texts are of their time. In the first text “The Primitive Artist” by Charles Barrett, he questions the quality, authenticity and age of the rock paintings at Mootwingee – whether they are a few centuries old or of old antiquity it – and apparently, it makes no difference. Barrett then praises the magic making art of Indigenous Australians, while at the same time encouraging us to look upon their art as merely pictures (Barrett, p. 11). He seems to be equally attracted and repulsed by “primitive art”, as an expression of man’s artistic tendency, in cave paintings and rock-carvings whose forms are grotesque and even repulsive.
Barrett admits that their finest decorations, on weapons and sacred objects, are magic: “Here is a magic truly; no “Art for Art’s sake.” (Barrett, p. 12). And then in the next paragraph, while extolling that we should have more interest in the Australian race, and learn its culture, he announces that Indigenous Australians are “living fossils” and are failing. Using the terminology of Edward S. Curtis (who photographed the First Nations Peoples of America in the early 20th century), they are The Vanishing Race(1904), the title of his photograph of Navajo riding off into an indeterminate distance. Destined for extinction. Further, Barrett states that every “relic” of the Aboriginals is worth preserving, as though all Indigenous people were already a historical artefact, no longer living. The use of the word relic is informative: its derivation comes from Old French relique (originally plural), from Latin reliquiae, the latter mid 17th century Latin, feminine plural (used as a noun) of reliquus ‘remaining’, based on linquere ‘to leave’. In other words, they remain and leave at one and the same time, the remainder only a husk of the original.
In the second text “The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon, the researcher and psychologist into Indigenous art is urged, indeed must, divest themselves of all civilised conceptions and mentality and assume those of a prehistoric man – or that of a child. “Prior or the British settlement of Eastern Australia – to be precise, prior to Governor Phillip establishing his colony at Port Jackson, there appears to be no record of aboriginal paintings or carvings.” (A.S. Kenyon, p. 22) What Kenyon seems to be suggesting is that it is only through the influence of the “civilised” Europeans that Indigenous Australians begin painting and carving. A description of the various representational techniques of Indigenous Australian art making follows, the art divided into two classes: fixed and portable. “In the first class, those of fixed objects, we have (a) rock-paintings; (b) rock-carvings; (c) tree-carvings; (d) tree-paintings; (e) ground-paintings; (f) ground-models. In the second, or portable class, there are (a) figures or models; (b) weapons, implements and utensils, decorated either by painting or carving; (c) ceremonial objects; (d) ornaments or personal adornment; (e) bark-paintings. (A.S. Kenyon, p. 27)
I believe it is important to have these texts (which are less than 100 years old), and the paradoxical historical attitudes towards Australian Indigenous culture and art they contain, published online. The pamphlet recognises Aboriginal culture yet also rules a ledger under it. (Professor Tom Griffiths’ observations on Geoffrey Blainey’s book Triumph of the Nomads). The attitude was that while this “primitive art” was worthy of study, ultimately it belonged to an archaic, fragile culture which was destined to be consigned to history.
I am so glad that this spiritual culture (and the changing Western understanding of Australian Indigenous art and culture) has proved the authors wrong.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Title page of the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952
Preface of the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952
“The Primitive Artist” by Charles Barrett in the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 5
“The Primitive Artist” by Charles Barrett in the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 6-7
Unknown photographer. “Mootwingee Rock Carvings. Pecked Type,” in “The Primitive Artist” by Charles Barrett from the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 6
Unknown photographer. “Great Rock Shelter at Mootwingee, New South Wales,” in “The Primitive Artist” by Charles Barrett from the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 7
Unknown photographer. “Rock Engraving, Mootwingee,” in “The Primitive Artist” by Charles Barrett from the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 7
“The Primitive Artist” by Charles Barrett in the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 8-9
“Painted Shields from North Queensland,” in “The Primitive Artist” by Charles Barrett from the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 9
“The Primitive Artist” by Charles Barrett in the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 10-11
“Bark Drawing. Northern Territory. Native in canoe spearing crocodile,” in “The Primitive Artist” by Charles Barrett from the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 11
“The Primitive Artist” by Charles Barrett in the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 12-13
“Rock Painting, South Africa,” in “The Primitive Artist” by Charles Barrett from the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 12
“The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon in the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 14-15
“Native Corroboree. Drawn by Tommy Barnes, a Mission Aboriginal, showing European influence,” in “The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon from the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 14.
“The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon in the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 16-17
“Prehistoric Rock Painting, Spain. Showing superimposed figures,” in “The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon from the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 16
“Stone Churingas from Central Australia. Showing symbolic and totemic figures,” in “The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon from the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 17
“The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon in the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 18-19
“The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon in the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 20-21
“Rock Paintings. Prince Regent River, North-west Australia. Superimposed figures,” in “The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon from the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 21
“The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon in the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 22-23
“Bark drawing representing Settler’s Homestead, Lake Tyrrell, Victoria,” in “The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon from the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 23
“The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon in the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 24-25
“Rock Carvings, Port Jackson, New South Wales. Grooved type,” in “The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon from the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 25
“The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon in the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 26-27
“Rock Painting, Prince Regent River, North-west Australia. From Bradshaw’s original sketch,” in “The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon from the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 26
“The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon in the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 28-29
Unknown photographer. “Stencilled Hands in the Cave of Hands, Victoria Range, Victoria,” in “The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon from the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 29
“The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon in the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 30-31
“Rock Painting, Cave of the Serpent, Langi Ghiran, Victoria,” in “The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon from the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 30
“The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon in the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 32-33
Edmund Milne. “Carved Tree. From a photograph by Edmund Milne,” in “The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon from the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 32
“The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon in the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 34-35
“Decorated Shields, Carved and Painted,” in “The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon from the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 34
“The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon in the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 36-37
“Painted Bark Bags, Northern Territory,” in “The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon from the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 36
“The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon in the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 38-39
“Bark Paintings, Alligator River, Northern Territory,” in “The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon from the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 38
Unknown photographer. “Making Tracings of Rock Paintings, Glen Isla Rock Shelter, Victoria Range, Victoria,” in “The Art of the Australian Aboriginal” by A.S. Kenyon from the pamphlet Australian Aboriginal Art with texts by Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon (text reprinted from the 1929 exhibition), National Museum of Victoria, 1952, p. 39
Likely by Antoine-François-Jean Claudet (French, Lyon 1797 – 1867 London) Possibly by Nicolaas Henneman (Dutch, Heemskerk 1813 – 1898 London) The Chess Players (detail) c. 1845 Salted paper print from paper negative Sheet: 9 5/8 × 7 11/16 in. (24.5 × 19.6cm) Image: 7 13/16 × 5 13/16 in. (19.8 × 14.7cm) Bequest of Maurice B. Sendak, 2012 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Public domain
An excellent selection of photographs in this posting. I particularly like the gender-bending, shape-shifting, age-distorting 1850s-60s Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits by an unknown artist. I’ve never seen anything like it before, especially from such an early date. Someone obviously took a lot of care, had a great sense of humour and definitely had a great deal of fun making the album.
Other fascinating details include the waiting horses and carriages in Fox Talbot’s View of the Boulevards of Paris (1843); the mannequin perched above the awning of the photographic studio in Dowe’s Photograph Rooms, Sycamore, Illinois (1860s); and the chthonic underworld erupting from the tilting ground in Carleton E. Watkins’ California Oak, Santa Clara Valley (c. 1863).
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
When The Met first opened its doors in 1870, photography was still relatively new. Yet over the preceding three decades it had already developed into a complex pictorial language of documentation, social and scientific inquiry, self-expression, and artistic endeavour.
These initial years of photography’s history are the focus of this exhibition, which features new and recent gifts to the Museum, many offered in celebration of The Met’s 150th anniversary and presented here for the first time. The works on view, from examples of candid portraiture and picturesque landscape to pioneering travel photography and photojournalism, chart the varied interests and innovations of early practitioners.
The exhibition, which reveals photography as a dynamic medium through which to view the world, is the first of a two-part presentation that plays on the association of “2020” with clarity of vision while at the same time honouring farsighted and generous collectors and patrons. The second part will move forward a century, bringing together works from the 1940s through the 1960s.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Likely by Antoine-François-Jean Claudet (French, Lyon 1797 – 1867 London) Possibly by Nicolaas Henneman (Dutch, Heemskerk 1813 – 1898 London) The Chess Players c. 1845 Salted paper print from paper negative Sheet: 9 5/8 × 7 11/16 in. (24.5 × 19.6cm) Image: 7 13/16 × 5 13/16 in. (19.8 × 14.7cm) Bequest of Maurice B. Sendak, 2012 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Public domain
Lewis Carroll (British, Daresbury, Cheshire 1832 – 1898 Guildford) [Alice Liddell] June 25, 1870 Albumen silver print from glass negative Sheet: 6 1/4 × 5 9/16 in. (15.9 × 14.1cm) Image: 5 7/8 × 4 15/16 in. (15 × 12.6cm) Bequest of Maurice B. Sendak, 2012 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Public domain
Eighteen-year-old Alice Liddell’s slumped pose, clasped hands, and sullen expression invite interpretation. A favoured model of Lewis Carroll, and the namesake of his novel Alice in Wonderland, Liddell had not seen the writer and photographer for seven years when this picture was made; her mother had abruptly ended all contact in 1863. The young woman poses with apparent unease in this portrait intended to announce her eligibility for marriage. The session closed a long and now controversial history with Carroll, whose portraits of children continue to provoke speculation. In what was to be her last sitting with the photographer, Liddell embodies the passing of childhood innocence that Carroll romanticised through the fictional Alice.
Unknown photographer (American) [Surveyor] c. 1854 Daguerreotype Case: 1.6 × 9.2 × 7.9cm (5/8 × 3 5/8 × 3 1/8 in.) Gift of Charles Isaacs and Carol Nigro, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary, 2019 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Public domain
This portrait of a surveyor from an unknown daguerreotype studio was made during the heyday of the Daguerreian era in the United States, a time that coincided with an increased need for survey data and maps for the construction of railways, bridges, and roads. The unidentified surveyor, seated in a chair, grasps one leg of the tripod supporting his transit, a type of theodolite or surveying instrument that comprised a compass and rotating telescope. The carefully composed scene, in which the angle of the man’s skyward gaze is aligned with the telescope and echoed by one leg of the tripod, conflates its surveyor subject with an astronomer. As a result, the lands of young America are compared to the vast reaches of space, with both territories full of potential discovery.
Unknown photographer (American) [Surveyor] c. 1854 Daguerreotype Case: 1.6 × 9.2 × 7.9cm (5/8 × 3 5/8 × 3 1/8 in.) Gift of Charles Isaacs and Carol Nigro, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary, 2019 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Public domain
Alphonse Delaunay (French, 1827-1906) Patio de los Arrayanes, Alhambra, Granada, Spain 1854 Albumen silver print from paper negative 10 in. × 13 5/8 in. (25.4 × 34.6cm) Gift of W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg, 2017 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Public domain
One of the most talented students of famed French photographer Gustave Le Gray, Delaunay was virtually unknown before a group of his photographs appeared at auction in 2007. Subsequent research led to the identification of several bodies of work, including the documentation of contemporary events through instantaneous views captured on glass negatives. Delaunay also was a particular devotee of the calotype (or paper negative) process, with which he created his best pictures – including this view of the Alhambra. Among a group of pictures he made between 1851 and 1854 in Spain and Algeria, this view of the Patio de los Arrayanes reveals the extent to which Delaunay was able to manipulate the peculiarities of the paper negative. He revels in the graininess of the image, purposefully not masking out the sky before printing the negative, so that the marble tower appears somehow carved out of the very atmosphere that surrounds it. In contrast, the reflecting pool remains almost impossibly limpid, its dark surface offering a cool counterpart to the harsh Spanish sky.
Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) [Classical Head] probably 1839 Salted paper print 6 1/2 × 5 7/8 in. (16.5 × 15cm) Purchase, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, 2019 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Public domain
This luminous head seems to materialise before our very eyes, as if we are observing the moment in which the latent photographic image becomes visible. Nineteenth-century eyewitnesses to Hippolyte Bayard’s earliest photographs (direct positives on paper) described a similarly enchanting effect, in which hazy outlines coalesced with light and tone to form charmingly faithful, if indistinct, images. These works, which Bayard referred to as essais (tests or trials), often included statues and busts, which he frequently arranged in elaborate tableaux. In this case, he photographed the lone subject (an idealised classical head) from the front and side, as if it were a scientific specimen. The singular object emerges as a relic from photography’s origins and now distant past.
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, Dorset 1800 – 1877 Lacock) Group Taking Tea at Lacock Abbey August 17, 1843 Salted paper print from paper negative Mount: 9 15/16 in. × 13 in. (25.3 × 33cm) Sheet: 7 3/8 × 8 15/16 in. (18.7 × 22.7cm) Image: 5 in. × 7 1/2 in. (12.7 × 19cm) Bequest of Maurice B. Sendak, 2012 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Public domain
Although Talbot’s groundbreaking calotype (paper negative) process allowed for more instantaneous image making, works such as this one nevertheless reflect the technical limitations of early photography. Here, he adapts painterly conventions to the new medium, staging a genre scene on his family estate. The stilted arrangement of figures – rigidly posed to produce a clear image – belies Talbot’s attempt to show action in progress. To achieve sufficient light exposure, he photographed the domestic tableau outdoors, arranging his subjects before a blank backdrop to create the illusion of interior space.
Unknown artist (American or Canadian) [Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits] 1850s-1860s Albumen silver prints 5 15/16 × 5 1/8 × 2 1/16 in. (15.1 × 13 × 5.3cm) Bequest of Herbert Mitchell, 2008 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Public domain
Beginning in the late 1850s, cartes de visite, or small photographic portrait cards, were produced on a scale that put photography in the hands of the masses. This unusual collection of collages is ahead of its time in spoofing the rigidity of the format. The images play with scale and gender by juxtaposing cutout heads and mismatched sitters, thereby highlighting the difference between social identity – which was communicated in part through the exchange of calling cards – and individuality.
Unknown artist (American) [Studio Photographer at Work] c. 1855 Salted paper print Image: 5 1/8 × 3 13/16 in. (13 × 9.7cm) Sheet: 9 1/2 × 5 5/8 in. (24.1 × 14.3cm) William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art
In this evocative image, picture making takes centre stage. Underneath a canopy of dark cloth, the photographer poses as if to adjust the bellows of a large format camera. The view reflected on its ground glass would appear reversed and upside down. Viewers’ expectations are similarly overturned, because the photographer’s subject remains unseen.
Unknown artist (American) [Boy Holding a Daguerreotype] 1850s Daguerreotype with applied colour Image: 3 1/4 × 2 3/4 in. (8.3 × 7cm) William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The boy in this picture clutches a cased image to his chest, as if to illustrate his affection for the subject depicted within. Daguerreotypes were a novel form of handheld picture, portable enough to slip into a pocket or palm. Portraits exchanged between friends and family could be kept close – a practice often mimed by sitters, who would pose for one daguerreotype while holding another.
James Fitzallen Ryder (American, 1826-1904) Locomotive James McHenry (58), Atlantic and Great Western Railway 1862 Albumen silver print Image: 7 3/8 × 9 1/4 in. (18.7 × 23.5cm) Mount: 10 × 13 in. (25.4 × 33cm) William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art
In spring 1862, the chief engineer in charge of building the Atlantic and Great Western Railway – which ran from Salamanca, New York, to Akron, Ohio, and from Meadville to Oil City, Pennsylvania – engaged James Ryder to make photographs that would convince shareholders of the worthiness of the project. Ryder’s assignment was “to photograph all the important points of the work, such as excavations, cuts, bridges, trestles, stations, buildings and general character of the country through which the road ran, the rugged and the picturesque.” In a converted railroad car kitted out with a darkroom, water tank, and developing sink, he processed photographs that make up one of the earliest rail surveys.
Attributed to Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, Wayland, Massachusetts 1808 – 1901 Crawford Notch, New Hampshire) Winter on the Common, Boston 1850s Salted paper print Window: 6 15/16 × 8 15/16 in. (17.6 × 22.7cm) Mat: 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8cm) William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Having originally set his sights on a career as a painter, Josiah Hawes gave up his brushes for a camera upon first seeing a daguerreotype in 1841. Two years later, he joined Albert Sands Southworth in Boston to form the celebrated photographic studio Southworth & Hawes. Turning to paper-based photography in the early 1850s, Hawes frequently depicted local scenery. This surprising picture, which presents Boston Common through a veil of snow-laden branches, shows that Hawes brought his creative ambitions to the nascent art of photography.
Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916) [California Oak, Santa Clara Valley] c. 1863 Albumen silver print Image: 12 in. × 9 5/8 in. (30.5 × 24.5cm) Mount: 21 1/4 in. × 17 5/8 in. (54 × 44.8cm) William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art
For viewers today, the crown of this majestic oak tree, with its complex network of branches, might evoke the allover paintings of Abstract Expressionism with their layers of dripped paint. As photographed by Carleton Watkins, the dark, flattened silhouette of the tree feathers out across the camera’s field of view. The sloped horizon line, uncommon in Watkins’s output, both echoes the ridge in the distance and grounds the energy of the tree canopy, ably demonstrating his masterful command of pictorial composition.
George Wilson Bridges (British, 1788-1864) Garden of Selvia, Syracuse, Sicily 1846 Salted paper print from paper negative Image: 6 15/16 × 8 9/16 in. (17.7 × 21.7cm) Sheet: 7 5/16 × 8 13/16 in. (18.5 × 22.4cm) Bequest of Maurice B. Sendak, 2012 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Public domain
The monk’s gesture of prayer in this image by George Wilson Bridges is a touchstone of stillness against the impressive landscape and vegetation that rise up behind him. Bridges was an Anglican reverend and friend of William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the calotype (paper negative), who instructed him on the method before it was patented. Bridges was also one of the earliest photographers to embark upon a tour of the Mediterranean region; he wrote to Talbot that he conceived of the excursion both as a technical mission to advance photography and as a pilgrimage to collect imagery of religious sites.
Pietro Dovizielli (Italian, 1804-1885) [Spanish Steps, Rome] c. 1855 Albumen silver print from glass negative Image: 14 11/16 × 11 5/16 in. (37.3 × 28.8cm) Sheet: 24 7/16 × 18 7/8 in. (62 × 48cm) Gift of W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary, 2019 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Public domain
Made in late afternoon light, Pietro Dovizielli’s picture shows a long shadow cast onto Rome’s Piazza di Spagna that almost obscures one of the market stalls flanking the base of the famed Spanish Steps. Rising above the sea of stairs is the church of Trinità dei Monti, its facade neatly bisected by the Sallustiano obelisk. In the piazza, a lone figure – the only visible inhabitant of this eerily empty public square – rests against the railing of the Barcaccia fountain. Keenly composed pictures like this led reviewers of Dovizielli’s photographs to proclaim them “the very paragons of architectural photography.”
Edouard Baldus (French (born Prussia), 1813-1889) [Amphitheater, Nîmes] c. 1853 Salted paper print from paper negative Overall: 12 3/8 × 15 3/16 in. (31.5 × 38.5cm) Gift of Joyce F. Menschel, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary, 2019 The Metropolitan Museum of Art
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, Dorset 1800 – 1877 Lacock) View of the Boulevards of Paris 1843 Salted paper print from paper negative Mount: 9 in. × 10 1/16 in. (22.8 × 25.6cm) Sheet: 7 3/8 × 10 1/8 in. (18.7 × 25.7cm) Image: 6 5/16 × 8 1/2 in. (16.1 × 21.6cm) Bequest of Maurice B. Sendak, 2012 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Public domain
In May 1843 Talbot traveled to Paris to negotiate a licensing agreement for the French rights to his patented calotype process. His invention used a negative-positive system and a paper base – not a copper support as in a daguerreotype. Although his negotiations were not fruitful, Talbot’s views of the elegant new boulevards of the French capital were highly successful.
Filled with the incidental details of urban life, architectural ornamentation, and the play of spring light, this photograph appears as the second plate in Talbot’s groundbreaking publication The Pencil of Nature (1844). The chimney posts on the roofline of the rue de la Paix, the waiting horses and carriages, and the characteristically French shuttered windows evoke as vivid a notion of mid-nineteenth-century Paris now as they must have 170 years ago.
Lewis Dowe (American, active 1860s-1880s) [Dowe’s Photograph Rooms, Sycamore, Illinois] 1860s Albumen silver print Image: 5 7/8 × 7 5/8 in. (14.9 × 19.3cm) Mount: 8 × 10 in. (20.3 × 25.4cm) William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Above a bustling thoroughfare in Sycamore, Illinois, boldface lettering advertises the services of photographer Lewis Dowe, a portraitist who also published postcards and stereoviews. Easier to miss in the image is a mannequin perched above the awning to promote the studio. The flurry of activity below Dowe’s storefront and the prime location of the outfit, poised between a tailor and a saloon, speak to the important role of photography in town life.
E. & H. T. Anthony (American) [Specimens of New York Bill Posting] 1863 Albumen silver prints Mount: 3 1/4 in. × 6 3/4 in. (8.3 × 17.1cm) Image: 2 15/16 in. × 6 in. (7.5 × 15.3cm) William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Benefit concerts, minstrel shows, lectures, and horse races all clamour for attention in this graphic field of broadsides posted in the Bowery neighbourhood of Manhattan. The stereograph format lends added depth and dimensionality to the layered fragments of text, transporting viewers to a hectic city sidewalk. Published for a national market, the scene indexes a precise moment in the summer of 1863, offering armchair tourists an inadvertent trend report on downtown cultural life.
Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) The Diamond and Wasp, Balaklava Harbour March, 1855 Albumen silver print from glass negative Image: 8 in. × 10 1/8 in. (20.3 × 25.7cm) Mount: 19 5/16 × 24 3/4 in. (49 × 62.9cm) Gift of Thomas Walther Collection, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary, 2019 The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Fenton’s view of the Black Sea port of Balaklava, which the British used as a landing point for their siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, shows a busy but orderly operation. The British naval ships, HMS Diamond and HMS Wasp, oversaw the management of transports into and out of the harbour, which explains the presence of ships and rowboats, as well as the large stack of crates near the rail track in the foreground. Against claims of “rough-and-tumble” mismanagement of Balaklava in the British press, Fenton (commissioned by a Manchester publisher to record the theatre of war) offers documentation of a well-functioning port.
Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) The Mamelon and Malakoff from front of Mortar Battery April, 1855 Salted paper print from glass negative Image: 9 1/8 × 13 1/2 in. (23.1 × 34.3cm) Sheet: 14 3/4 × 17 13/16 in. (37.5 × 45.3cm) Gift of Joyce F. Menschel, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary, 2019 The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Fenton’s extensive documentation of the Crimean War – the first use of photography for that purpose – was a commercial endeavour that did not include pictures of battle, the wounded, or the dead. His unprepossessing view of a vast rocky valley instead discloses, in the distance, a site of crucial strategic importance. Fort Malakoff, the general designation of Russian fortifications on two hills (Mamelon and Malakoff) is just perceptible at the horizon line. Malakoff’s capture by the French in September 1855, five months after Fenton made this photograph, ended the eleven-month siege of Sevastopol and was the final episode of the war.
Felice Beato (British (born Italy), Venice 1832-1909 Luxor) and James Robertson (British, 1813-1881) [Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem] 1856-1857 Albumen silver print Image: 9 in. × 11 1/4 in. (22.9 × 28.6cm) Mount: 17 5/8 in. × 22 1/2 in. (44.8 × 57.2cm) Gift of Joyce F. Menschel, 2013 The Metropolitan Museum of Art
This detailed print showing the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem provides a sense of the structure’s natural and architectural surroundings. Felice Beato depicted the religious site from a pilgrim’s point of view – walls and roads are given visual priority and stand between the viewer and the shrine. Holy sites such as this were the earliest and most common subjects of travel photography. Beato made multiple journeys to the Mediterranean and North Africa, and he is perhaps best known for photographing East Asia in the 1880s.
R.C. Montgomery (American, active 1850s) [Self-Portrait (?)] 1850s Daguerreotype with applied colour Image: 3 1/4 × 4 1/4 in. (8.3 × 10.8cm) William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The insouciant subject here may be the daguerreotypist himself, posing in bed for a promotional picture or a private joke. His rumpled suit and haphazard hairstyle affect intimacy, perhaps in an effort to showcase an informal portrait style. Because they required long exposure times, daguerreotypes often captured sitters at their most stilted. With this surprising picture, the maker might have hoped to attract clients who were in search of a more novel or natural likeness.
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Af Klint is one my favourite painters. At such an early date (preceding any man), she created new forms from her imagination, abstract forms, that connect to, and exist, on a celestial plane.
af Klint studied Theosophy and Rosicrucianism, expanding her consciousness, trusting that “knowledge of a deeper spiritual reality could be achieved through focused attention on intuition, meditation, and other means of transcending normal human consciousness.” All from 1906-1907 onwards.
Her paintings and drawings emit an aura, her aura “drawn” into a cosmic aura, as a revelation of spirit – invisible dimensions that exist beyond the visible world – a connection from our reality to the spirit of the cosmos. Childhood; youth; adulthood; primordial chaos; eros; evolution; the altar and the tree of knowledge. All knowledge that allows us access to the divine, that opens us not to phenomena, but to the noumenal experiences of the felt, spiritual sublime.
Imagine af Klint painting her huge canvases on the floor of her studio, so many years before Jackson Pollock attempted the same connection to altered consciousness, and creating these symbolic and sensation/al masterpieces. Then to have the prescience to understand that the world was not ready for her art, would not understand it, had no way of comprehending the enormity of her artistic enquiry. To leave “a radical body of work – unprecedented in its use of colour, scale and composition – which she hoped future audiences might be better able to sense and decode.” All in hope!
Leaving everything to her nephew, she instructed him not to even open the boxes of her abstract art (which she never exhibited during her lifetime) until 20 years after her death in the late 1960s. In the ultimate irony, in 1970 her entire collection was offered to the Moderna Museet as a gift – the very museum in which this exhibition is being staged – AND THEY REFUSED THE GIFT.
What were the big wigs and curators (probably all men) at the Moderna Museet thinking in 1970? Didn’t they use their eyes, didn’t they sense the bravery of af Klint’s artistic enquiry, or feel the ecstatic (involving an experience of mystic self-transcendence) ecstasy of her work – that rapture of an emotional divine!
I am SO happy her work is now being acclaimed. For the force was truly with her.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Moderna Museet Malmö for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The exhibition opens with the joyful series dedicated to Eros, the Greek god of love, associated with fertility and desire. Full of life, these pink-hued works take up the theme of polarity between male and female as the driving force of evolution. These abstract works completely differ from the classic representation of Eros.
In the series “The Seven-Pointed Star”(1908), Hilma af Klint experimented with a greater economy of line, depicting spiralling energy expanding outwards and forming new centres. As is the case with most of af Klint’s work, there is no singular meaning. Seven is a sacred number in many cultures, associated with divine order, and also the eternal harmony of the universe. In Theosophy the star cluster, known as the Seven Stars or the Pleiades, transmits spiritual energy that eventually reaches the human plane.
During the spring and summer of 2020, Moderna Museet Malmö will give its visitors an opportunity to become acquainted with the fascinating and ground-breaking Swedish artist Hilma af Klint in a comprehensive presentation. The exhibition will present, among other works, the series “The Ten Largest,” which will be shown in it’s entirety.
Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was a pioneer of abstraction. As early as 1906 she had developed a rich, symbolic imagery that preceded the more broadly recognised emergence of abstract art. Since her retrospective at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2013, interest in the Swedish artist has increased all over the world. The exhibition “Hilma af Klint – Artist, Researcher, Medium” further expands our understanding of this groundbreaking artist and researcher.
Hilma af Klint studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm from 1882 to 1887 where she focused on naturalistic landscape and portrait paintings. Like many of her contemporaries, af Klint also had a keen interest in invisible dimensions that exist beyond the visible world. When painting she was convinced that she was in contact with higher consciousness, which conveyed messages through her. Her major series, “The Paintings for the Temple”, became the crux of this artistic inquiry.
The exhibition centres on three aspects of Hilma af Klint’s life and interests – as artist, researcher and medium – that are key to revealing and understanding her art. With few exceptions, af Klint never exhibited her abstract works during her lifetime. Yet she left us with a radical body of work – unprecedented in its use of colour, scale and composition – which she hoped future audiences might be better able to sense and decode.
Hilma af Klint made paintings for the future, and that future is now.
Artist and Medium
Like many of her contemporaries at the turn of the twentieth century, Hilma af Klint sought to expand her consciousness in order to gain a wider perspective on what we perceive as reality. Consciousness remains one of the deepest mysteries in our time, a subject eagerly explored in neurology, psychology, quantum physics and epigenetics. As part of her spiritual practice, af Klint meditated, adhered to a vegetarian diet, and studied Theosophy and Rosicrucianism. These two esoteric schools thought knowledge of a deeper spiritual reality could be achieved through focused attention on intuition, meditation, and other means of transcending normal human consciousness. Over a period of ten years, af Klint met weekly with four other women, known as De fem (“The Five”). They trained their capability to access or “channel” higher levels of consciousness through contact with spiritual guides known as De Höga (“The Masters”). Af Klint received a specific assignment, which she accepted, known as “The Paintings for the Temple”. She worked throughout her life to understand the deeper meaning embedded in these works.
“The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless, I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brushstroke.”
The artist described how she painted the series as a medium, where shapes, colours and compositions came to her. Although af Klint perceived these works as flowing uninhibitedly through her guided hand, she very much applied herself and all her skills in the process: she worked methodically and sequentially in series, divided into thematically and formally focused groups exploring different aspects of cosmic and human evolution.
The Paintings for the Temple
Between 1906 and 1915, Hilma af Klint created “The Paintings for the Temple”. It comprises 193 paintings and drawings, divided into series and groups. Works produced between 1906 and 1908 are on view in the Turbine Hall; works from the second part of the series from 1912 to 1915 are on view in the upstairs galleries at Moderna Museet Malmö.
The overall theme of the series is to convey different aspects of human evolution, instigated by polarity. “The Paintings for the Temple” also thematises different stages of development that every human being goes through during life on earth. The temple in the title refers not only to a physical building, which af Klint imagined would house the work, but also to the body as a temple for the soul.
Like many of the other series within “The Paintings for the Temple”, “The Ten Largest”seems somehow unfettered by limitations of place and time. Across ten canvases, swirling shapes in soft pastel colours rhythmically interact with cursive letters, forming a kind of visual poem. Petals, ovaries, flowers and spirals pulsate in constant sparks of creation. Hilma af Klint attributed this series to the exploration of the human life cycle, from childhood and youth to adulthood and old age. The artist created the ten works between November and December of 1907 on large sheets of paper later glued onto canvas. Given the unusual scale of the works, it is likely that af Klint painted each canvas, while it was lying flat on her studio floor.
On June 16, Moderna Museet Malmö opened again after having been closed for a time in response to the Coronavirus pandemic. Finally, Hilma af Klint – Artist, Researcher, Medium, a comprehensive presentation of the artist with 230 works occupying the entire museum building, can be experienced by the public.
Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was an artist who allowed herself to take a broader perspective on life and who wanted to open up new ways of looking at reality. Her achievement as a pioneer of abstract art has been celebrated before, but with the exhibition Hilma af Klint – Artist, Researcher, Medium, Moderna Museet Malmö now wants to offer new insights into the artist’s systematic research.
“Hilma af Klint radically turned away from the portrayal of a visible reality,” says Iris Müller-Westermann. “For her, art making was about visualising contexts that lie beyond what the eye can see. Af Klint was convinced that she was connected to a higher level of consciousness when she was making her works. The exhibition argues that her spiritual practice was inextricably linked to her artistic practice. First and foremost, however, Hilma af Klint believed in the power of images.”
The whole Moderna Museet Malmö has been transformed into Hilma af Klint’s temple. The exhibition spans the artist’s entire career, and the selection of works examines the artist’s research into nature and the links between the visible and invisible worlds. In addition, the comprehensive exhibition touches on the artist’s own thoughts about her work and its various methods.
“Hilma af Klint had an inquisitive mind,” says Milena Høgsberg. “For her, painting was both an artistic activity and a spiritual one. When she was painting she meditatively allowed something bigger to pass through her and manifest itself in works of art. She then spent her life, systematically and analytically trying to understand the meaning behind her paintings, drawings, and writings.”
The heart of the exhibition are The Paintings for the Temple (1906-1915), which the artist considered her most important works. They also include the magnificent series The Ten Largest from 1907.
In conjunction with the exhibition, a comprehensive and richly illustrated catalogue has been produced, with essays by Iris Müller-Westermann, Milena Høgsberg in conversation with Tim Rudbøg, Hedvig Martin, Ernst Peter Fischer, and Anne Sophie Jørgensen. The exhibition catalogue has been published in two editions – one in Swedish and one in English.
Hilma af Klint – Artist, Researcher, Medium will be on view at Moderna Museet Malmö until September 27, 2020.
Text from the Moderna Museet Malmö website
Installation views, Hilma af Klint, Moderna Museet Malmö, 2020 Photos: Helene Toresdotter/Moderna Museet
“The Dove” (1915) depicts the creation process. It draws upon Christian symbols such as the dove for spirit, peace and unity. It also thematises the battle between the forces of light and darkness through the allegory of Saint George and the Dragon.
Installation view, Hilma af Klint, Moderna Museet Malmö, 2020 showing at left The Dove, No. 1, and at right The Dove, No. 9 Photo: Helene Toresdotter/Moderna Museet
“Primordial Chaos” (1906-1907) is devoted to the creation of the physical world. From the original unity a polarised world arose out of spirit, shown here as feminine (blue and the eyelet) and masculine (yellow and the hook), and also as W (material) and U (spirit). These works are full of spirals of energy and sparks of creation, of symbols of fertility and rebirth (sperm, snakes, crosses).
Installation view, Hilma af Klint, Moderna Museet Malmö, 2020 showing at left works from the series Evolution, and at centre works from the series Primordial Chaos Photo: Helene Toresdotter/Moderna Museet
The theme of the evolution of consciousness runs throughout “The Paintings for the Temple”. In the series “Evolution” (1908), the process of development is shown through the interplay between polarities: male and female, light and darkness, good and evil. Compositionally these works strive to find a balance, in horizontal and vertical mirroring. Hilma af Klint’s exploration seems aligned with the theosophist notion of evolution as a spiritual process, extending beyond the biological perspective on human development that, with the publishing of Darwin’s “The Evolution of the Species” fifty years earlier, had gained widespread notoriety. This series ends the first part of “The Paintings for the Temple”, as the commission was paused between 1908 and 1912.
When Hilma af Klint resumed her work on “The Paintings for the Temple”in 1912, her abstraction became more geometric in nature, and Christian symbols became increasingly pronounced. When working, the artist was still in contact with higher planes of consciousness but was encouraged to interpret spiritual messages more freely.
Viewed in sequence, “The Swan” (1914-1915) has a distinct visual rhythm. Often a horizontal line breaks the canvases into two sections where opposite forces meet – light and dark, male and female, life and death. These poles unfold as a black and white swan. Eventually, figuration gives way to abstraction in a fuller spectrum of colour. In the final work in the series, the swan pair returns, unified at the centre, intertwined yet distinct and balanced as male and female poles.
Hilma af Klint understood the three powerful “Altarpieces” (1915) as the essence of “The Paintings for the Temple”. These works capture the two directions of spiritual evolution: the ascension from the material world back to unity (the triangle pointing to the golden circle) and the descension from divine unity into the diversity of the material world (the inverted triangle). In the third and final painting, a small six-pointed star within the large golden circle is an esoteric symbol for the universe.
Text from the Moderna Museet Malmö website
Installation views, Hilma af Klint, Moderna Museet Malmö, 2020 showing work from the series Altarpieces Photo: Helene Toresdotter/Moderna Museet
The title of this series from 1916 may refer to the legend of King Arthur, in which Parsifal, one of the Knights of the Round Table, takes part in the quest for the Holy Grail. On 144 sheets, of which a selection is on view, Hilma af Klint depicts the search for knowledge as a journey through various levels of consciousness. In the first image this is marked by a winding path through the darkness towards the white light at the centre of the spiral. In other works, a young boy, shown in different ages, attempts to balance between matter and spirit, up and down. This exploration is continued in radically conceptual yellow monochromes, inscribed with words marking direction: “NedÃ¥t” (downward), “FramÃ¥t” (forward), “BakÃ¥t” (backward), “UtÃ¥t” (outward) and “InÃ¥t” (inward). Parsifal’s journey also mirrors the artist’s own process in the inward journey she has undertaken by accepting, completing and trying to understand “The Paintings for the Temple”.
Between 1896 and 1906, Hilma af Klint and four other women formed the group “De Fem” (“The Five”). They met weekly to meditate, read spiritual literature and accesses higher consciousness through communication with spirit guides, “De Höga” (“The Masters”). These meetings were meticulously recorded in writing and led even to automatic drawings. The women took turns to wield the pen during their sessions, but individual authorship was not important, and rarely indicated on the drawings. The pastel works on view exhibit elements that recur in af Klint’s later work – for example, spiral, stylised floral motifs and other geometrical forms.
Installation views, Hilma af Klint, Moderna Museet Malmö, 2020 showing at bottom left, the Tree of Knowledge series 1915; and at centre right, work from Late Series Photo: Helene Toresdotter/Moderna Museet
New Gallery is dedicated to Hilma af Klint the researcher, specifically her effort to process and understand the deeper meaning of her spiritually guided work in paintings, drawings and writing, from the 1890s to 1930s. Af Klint had an inquisitive mind. She came from a family of naval officers and nautical cartographers and approached her artistic practice with structured rigour. While she had the courage to open herself to let something larger flow through her while painting, she approached the resulting body of work in asystematic and analytic way.
Throughout her life, af Klint took copious notes, regarding her experiences and interpretations of the messages she apprehended through her spiritual practice. After completing “The Paintings for the Temple”, the artist tried to methodically gain an overview of her work and its possible meanings. In the spirit of a scientific researcher, she edited and reorganised her early notes, created a dictionary of the symbols that appeared in her works and catalogued all the works in “The Paintings for the Temple” in a portable portfolio. Remarkably, af Klint understood all of her works of art as a unified project – a notion radical for the time, but also a testament to the fact that she believed her work to have a higher purpose.
In the series the “Tree of Knowledge” (1913-1915), Hilma af Klint maps the different spiritual planes of existence in order to picture the complexity of existence and the connection between the earth and the divine. In later series like “Series IV” (1920) and “VII” (1920), af Klint seems to focus her research on symbols such as the cross, the circle and the triangle as well as the six-pointed star and processes these sacred symbols instigate. Many of these works are characterised by a geometric idiom and involve analysis on both the macrocosmic and microcosmic level.
Installation view, Hilma af Klint, Moderna Museet Malmö, 2020
The Blue Books
In 1917, Hilma af Klint had a studio built on Munsö, where for the first time she had the possibility of seeing all “The Paintings for the Temple’s” different series in their entirety. Perhaps this is what precipitated the creation of the ten blue-bound books, a portable overview of “The Paintings for the Temple”. On each spread, a work is represented by a black-and-white photograph and a watercolour intended to give an accurate impression of the original. In some of the watercolours, af Klint adds close-ups and lets us examine the work as if through a microscope in order to further clarify what was not clear enough in the paintings. The works were organised in concordance with the order of the series. This tremendous effort demonstrates that af Klint wanted to reinvestigate and reflect on her life’s work in a systematic way and perhaps to share it more easily with others.
In “The Atom Series”from 1917, Hilma af Klint explored another aspect of life that could not be perceived by the human eye: the world of atoms and their energy, a science popular at the time. Apart from the first two drawings, all feature two renderings of an atom: a large one in the lower right, which represents the energy of a physical atom, and a smaller one in the upper left, which represents the atom on an etheric or metaphysical plane. In handwritten notes, af Klint describes the atom as embodying human properties. For the theosophists, whom the artist studied, the discovery of atoms, sub-particle waves etc., were seen as proof of an invisible reality beyond the perceptible world. For af Klint, atoms and thus humans were spiritual entities connected to the centre of the universe.
Throughout her life, Hilma af Klint had a deep interest in nature and botany. Her early botanical studies up to the late watercolours, convey that she was not only a keen observer, but also possessed a rigorously analytic mind, which she could apply in her endeavour to perceive aspects of existence beyond the visible.
Her botanical studies reveal a shifting focus from naturalistic renderings of plant-life as she observed it, to renderings intended to express the spiritual essence or presence beyond the visible body. In “The Violet, Blossoms with Guidelines, Series 1” (1919) she combines naturalistic renderings of the flower with a diagram of its essence. In “Blumen, Moose, Flechten” [Flowers, Moss, Lichens] (1919-1920), represented here as a facsimile, af Klint continues with her systematic investigation of the plant kingdom. She combines a diagram with the plant’s Latin name and the date of investigation, alongside properties such as joy, humility and devotion, which one can attempt to come in contact with through contemplation on the plant in question. By 1923, af Klint made yet another stylistic shift, influenced by Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophical views on aesthetics and her visits to the The Goetheanum, the centre for the anthroposophical movement in Dornach, Switzerland. Here af Klint gave up painting geometric compositions and began instead portraying the spiritual dimension of nature in fluid watercolours.
Moderna Museet Malmö is located in the city centre of Malmö. Ten minutes walk from the Central station, five minutes walk from Gustav Adolfs torg and Stortorget.
Exhibition dates: 11th September, 2019 – 2nd February, 2020 Visited October 2019 posted January 2020
Curators: Martin Myrone, Senior Curator, pre-1800 British Art, and Amy Concannon, Curator, British Art 1790-1850
Installation view of the exhibition William Blake at Tate Britain, London Photo: Marcus Bunyan
This first of two parts of this humongous posting. This exhibition has to be one of the highlights of my (art) life. The techniques, the colours, the forms and the MAGIC of Blake’s compositions brought me to tears.
“Every page is a window open in Heaven … interwoven designs companion the poems, and gold and yellow tints diffuse themselves over the page like summer clouds. The poems [of Songs of Innocence] are the morning song of Blake’s genius.”
W.B. Yeats
“Blake sang of the ideal world, of the truth of the intellect, and of the divinity of the imagination. … The only writer to have written songs for children with the soul of a child … he holds, in my view, a unique position because he unites intellectual sharpness with mystic sentiment.”
Tate Britain presents the largest survey of work by William Blake (1757-1827) in the UK for a generation. A visionary painter, printmaker and poet, Blake created some of the most iconic images in the history of British art and has remained an inspiration to artists, musicians, writers and performers worldwide for over two centuries. This ambitious exhibition brings together over 300 remarkable and rarely seen works and rediscovers Blake as a visual artist for the 21st century.
Tate Britain reimagines the artist’s work as he intended it to be experienced. Blake’s art was a product of his tumultuous times, with revolution, war and progressive politics acting as the crucible of his unique imagination, yet he struggled to be understood and appreciated during his life. Now renowned as a poet, Blake also had grand ambitions as a visual artist and envisioned vast frescos that were never realised. For the first time, The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan c. 1805-1809 and The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth c. 1805 have been enlarged and projected onto the gallery wall on the huge scale that Blake imagined. The original artworks are displayed nearby in a re-staging of Blake’s ill-fated exhibition of 1809, the artist’s only significant attempt to create a public reputation for himself as a painter. Tate has recreated the domestic room above his family hosiery shop in which the show was held, allowing visitors to encounter the paintings exactly as people did over 200 years ago.
The exhibition also provides a vivid biographical framework in which to consider Blake’s life and work. There is a focus on London, the city in which he was born and lived for most of his life. The burgeoning metropolis was a constant source of inspiration for the artist, offering an environment in which harsh realities and pure imagination were woven together. Blake’s creative freedom was also dependent on the unwavering support of those closest to him: his friends, family and patrons. Tate Britain highlights the vital presence of his wife Catherine Blake who offered both practical assistance and became an unacknowledged hand in the production of the artist’s engravings and illuminated books. The exhibition showcases a series of illustrations to Pilgrim’s Progress 1824-1827 and a copy of the book The Complaint, and the Consolation, or, Night Thoughts 1797, now thought to be coloured by Catherine.
William Blake was a staunch defender of the fundamental role of art in society and the importance of artistic freedom. Shaped by his personal struggles in a period of political terror and oppression, his technical innovation, and his political commitment, these beliefs have inspired the generations that followed and remain pertinent today. Tate Britain’s exhibition opens with Albion Rose c. 1793, an exuberant visualisation of the mythical founding of Britain, created in contrast to the commercialisation, austerity and crass populism of the times. A section of the exhibition is also dedicated to his illuminated books such as Songs of Innocence and of Experience 1794, his central achievement as a radical poet.
William Blake at Tate Britain is curated by Martin Myrone, Senior Curator, pre-1800 British Art, and Amy Concannon, Curator, British Art 1790-1850. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue from Tate Publishing and a programme of talks and events in the gallery.
Text from Tate Britain
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Albion Rose (installation views) c. 1793 Colour engraving 250 x 211 mm Courtesy of the Huntington Art Collections Photos: Marcus Bunyan
This image exemplifies how any single work by Blake might have multiple meanings. It can be related to several different strands within Blake’s poetry and thought. The figure has been reinterpreted many times, as a symbol of youthful rebellion, spiritual freedom and of creativity.
Wall text from the exhibition
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Albion Rose c. 1793 Colour engraving 250 x 211 mm Courtesy of the Huntington Art Collections
William Blake
The art and poetry of William Blake have influenced generations. He has inspired many creative people, political radicals and independent minds. His images and words are admired around the world for their originality and spirituality.
Blake lived at a time of radical thought, war and global unrest. The British Empire was expanding. New ideas about social justice developed alongside rapid industrialisation. Blake created imaginative images and texts that resonated with this changing world. They drew on his deeply felt religious beliefs and personal struggles.
The exhibition is organised chronologically. It takes us through the ups and downs of Blake’s creative and professional life. The full range of Blake’s work is on display here. His commercial engravings, original prints, his unique ‘illuminated books’ and paintings are all included. These have been drawn from public and private collections from around the world. To preserve these rarely seen objects, the light levels across the exhibition are deliberately low.
Blake’s art and poetry have appealed to many kinds of people, for different reasons. His work has provoked diverse interpretations. This exhibition does not try to explain Blake’s imagery and symbolism in a definitive way.
Instead it considers the reception of his art and how it was experienced by his contemporaries. It sets out the personal and social conditions in which it was made. In doing so we hope to reveal the circumstances that gave Blake the freedom to create such innovative works.
Wall text
Room 1
The art and poetry of William Blake have influenced generations. He has inspired many creative people, political radicals and independent minds. His images and words are admired around the world for their originality and spirituality.
Blake lived at a time of radical thought, war and global unrest. The British Empire was expanding. New ideas about social justice developed alongside rapid industrialisation. Blake created imaginative images and texts that resonated with this changing world. They drew on his deeply felt religious beliefs and personal struggles.
The exhibition is organised chronologically. It takes us through the ups and downs of Blake’s creative and professional life. The full range of Blake’s work is on display here. His commercial engravings, original prints, his unique ‘illuminated books’ and paintings are all included. These have been drawn from public and private collections from around the world. To preserve these rarely seen objects, the light levels across the exhibition are deliberately low.
Blake’s art and poetry have appealed to many kinds of people, for different reasons. His work has provoked diverse interpretations. This exhibition does not try to explain Blake’s imagery and symbolism in a definitive way. Instead it considers the reception of his art and how it was experienced by his contemporaries. It sets out the personal and social conditions in which it was made. In doing so we hope to reveal the circumstances that gave Blake the freedom to create such innovative works.
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Joseph Making himself Known to his Brethren (installation views) 1784-1785 India ink and watercolour over graphite on paper The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition William Blake at Tate Britain, London showing at left, Blake’s Joseph’s Brethren Bowing down before him (1784-1785) and at right, Joseph Ordering Simeon to be Bound (1784-1785) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The story of Joseph
Blake’s bitter view of the contemporary art world has its origins in the disappointments and frustrations he experienced early in his career.
In 1785 Blake exhibited these three watercolour designs showing the biblical story of Joseph. Blake showed them at the annual exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, the main showcase for contemporary art.
Students at the Academy were encouraged to depict serious, dramatic subject matter in a classical style. But these exhibitions were filled with more commercial artworks. The exhibition catalogue, also on display here, shows the dominance of portraits, landscapes and light-hearted ‘fancy’ subjects. Being watercolours, Blake’s designs were shown in a separate space where they got less public attention than the oil paintings in the main gallery.
Wall text from the exhibition
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Joseph’s Brethren Bowing down before him (installation views) 1784-1785 India ink and watercolour over graphite on paper The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition William Blake at Tate Britain, London with at bottom middle, Drawing of the legs of Cincinnatus (c. 1779-1780) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake wall text
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Drawing of the legs of Cincinnatus (installation view) c. 1779-1780 Ink and wash over graphite on paper Bolton Museum and Archive Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Catherine Blake (installation view) 1805 Graphite on paper 286 x 221 mm Tate. Bequeathed by Miss Alice G.E. Carthew 1940 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Catherine Blake 1805 Graphite on paper 286 x 221 mm Tate. Bequeathed by Miss Alice G.E. Carthew 1940
A portrait of William Blake, thought to be his only self-portrait, will be exhibited in the UK for the first time in a major survey of his work at Tate Britain. In the 200 years since its creation, the detailed pencil drawing only been shown once before and never in the artist’s own country. It offers a unique insight into the visionary painter, printmaker and poet responsible for some of Britain’s best loved artwork and will be displayed alongside a sketch of Blake’s wife Catherine from the same period, highlighting her vital contribution to his life and work.
Created when Blake was around 45 years old, the work is thought to present an idealised likeness. Rather than showing Blake as a painter or engraver, signs of his creative intensity are conveyed in his direct hypnotic gaze. This compelling image was produced after 1802, at a turning-point in Blake’s life. Having lived in Sussex for three years and been falsely accused of treason, Blake returned to his native city of London and was re-establishing himself as an artist. The portrait shows Blake as an isolated and misunderstood figure.
A crucial presence in Blake’s life, Catherine offered both practical assistance and became an unacknowledged hand in the production of his engravings and illuminated books. His visual art and poetry began to develop in original ways only after their marriage in 1782. At the time she was illiterate but learnt to read and write with her husband and became an accomplished printmaker in her own right. Together, these rare examples of Blake’s portraiture highlight the ways in which his extraordinary vision was dependent on the domestic stability of his life with Catherine.
Text from the Tate Britain website
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Portrait of William Blake (installation view) c. 1802 Graphite with black, white and grey washes on paper Collection of Robert N. Essick Photo: Marcus Bunyan
This is probably a self-portrait drawn by Blake when he was in his 40s. It does not present him in the act of writing or drawing. Instead, the image invites us to see his intense gaze as a sign of his creative force. This perhaps reflects his claim that he saw visions. Blake’s art and personal behaviour divided contemporary opinion. A few friends and supporters accepted him as a genius. Many others considered him eccentric or questioned his mental health.
Wall text from the exhibition
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Portrait of William Blake (installation view) c. 1802 Graphite with black, white and grey washes on paper Collection of Robert N. Essick Photo: Marcus Bunyan
‘Blake be an artist!’
Blake was born in London in 1757, the son of a fairly successful shopkeeper in Broad Street, Soho. Blake wanted to be an artist from an early age. His family indulged his passion. They bought prints and plaster casts for him to copy, paid for drawing lessons and funded his training as an apprentice engraver. In 1779 he enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy of Arts. This gallery explores the art he created in the years that followed. It was during this time that he developed his ambitions as an original artist and poet.
The Royal Academy encouraged its students to imitate the great art of the past. They were expected to copy antique sculptures and look to Renaissance artists like Michelangelo and Raphael for inspiration.
Blake later rejected the more rigid ideas associated with Academic teaching. He sought to create a more personal vision and began to identify with the ‘Gothic’ artists of the medieval past. He felt the Academy was being taken over by portrait painters motivated by self-interest. But he did admire some ambitious and individualistic figures there. These included James Barry and Henry Fuseli. Blake took seriously their ideas about painting great public works full of moral purpose and drama. The conflict between such aims and the realities of a cynical and market-driven art world would be a shaping force in Blake’s creative life.
Wall text from the exhibition
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Academy Study (installation view) 1779-1780 Graphite on paper Lent by the British Museum, London Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition William Blake at Tate Britain, London Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Early drawings and watercolours
Blake’s earliest drawings typically used sweeping lines and areas of grey washed ink or watercolour. His figures make grand gestures in bare, even abstract, settings.
His style was based on the innovative art of the 1760s and 1770s, especially the drawings of James Barry, Henry Fuseli, and John Flaxman. They became well known for creating works with strong visual and emotional impact and communicating ideas in a bold way.
Blake’s subjects were often drawn from history, literature and the Bible. This was in keeping with the teaching of the Royal Academy and traditional ideas about ‘high art’. However, Blake’s subject matter from these early years is sometimes unclear. Spiritual forms, ghosts and visions start to appear. This means that the story and meaning of his individual works can be difficult to decipher.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition William Blake at Tate Britain, London showing Blake’s Age Teaching Youth (c. 1785-1790) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) An Allegory of the Bible (installation view) c. 1780-1785 Graphite, ink and watercolour on paper Tate, Bequeathed by Miss Rachel M. Dyer 1969 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Blake started using more colours in the mid-1780s. The mysterious subject matter of this design is new as well. The title is not the artist’s own. It was added by later commentators, as is often the case with Blake’s symbolic designs.
Wall text from the exhibition
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) An Allegory of the Bible c. 1780-1785 Graphite, ink and watercolour on paper Tate, Bequeathed by Miss Rachel M. Dyer 1969
The title of this work is not Blake’s, but its theme seems to be the revelation of knowledge.
Unusually, the foreground and background were both painted initially with a single base colour. The figures and the screen behind those in the background were applied straight onto the white paper. The screen and the lower half of the sky behind it were originally painted a deep rose, with a red lake pigment that is probably brazilwood. This has lost so much colour, except at the edges, that it gives the unintended effect of a flat brown base tone to the whole screen.
Gallery label, September 2004
Installation view of the exhibition William Blake at Tate Britain, London showing Blake’s The Good Farmer, Probably the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares (c. 1780-1785) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
This is an illustration of one of Christ’s parables, which appears in several biblical sources.
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) The Good Farmer, Probably the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares (installation view) c. 1780-1785 Ink and watercolour on paper Tate. Bequeathed by Miss Alice G.E. Carthew 1940 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition William Blake at Tate Britain, London Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Tiriel
In the late 1780s Blake had established a reputation as a designer and poet among a small circle of friends. He began writing an epic poem, which he also intended to illustrate. It is not clear how Blake would have funded the production of an illustrated edition and it was not published.
Blake’s manuscript and many of the surviving drawings are displayed here. The story combined elements of Greek tragedy and Shakespeare. It also drew on supposedly ancient Gaelic stories (actually composed by the Scottish writer James Macpherson in the 1760s). The narrative concerns a king, now blind, his arguments with his sons and daughters, and his encounter with his elderly parents, Har and Heva. The language is dramatic, with exaggerated imagery suggesting surging emotions, ‘Thunder & fire & pestilence’.
The project represents the culmination of Blake’s early efforts as a painter and poet. It also exposes how his ambitions to combine epic images and texts were frustrated by conventional publishing techniques.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition William Blake at Tate Britain, London Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing c. 1786 Watercolour and graphite on paper Support: 475 × 675 mm Tate. Presented by Alfred A. de Pass in memory of his wife Ethel 1910 Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)
The subject is from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream illustrating Titania’s instruction to her fairy train in the last scene:
Hand in hand, with fairy grace, Will we sing, and bless this place.
Oberon and Titania, King and Queen of the fairies, are on the left. Puck, the perplexer of mortals, faces us. The fairies Moth and Peaseblossom are easily identifiable.
During the 1780s there was a growing taste for Shakespeare illustrations. Blake had formed a print-publishing partnership in 1784. If the approximate dating of this work is correct, it may represent an attempt by Blake to break into this market.
Supernatural and fantastical subject matter like this enjoyed great popularity in Blake’s time.
Wall text from the exhibition and gallery label, August 2004
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing (installation view details) c. 1786 Watercolour and graphite on paper Support: 475 × 675 mm Tate. Presented by Alfred A. de Pass in memory of his wife Ethel 1910 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition William Blake at Tate Britain, London Photos: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Europe, A Prophecy (Copy E) (installation views) 1794 Book, 17 plates on 10 leaves Open to plates 17: Ethinius queen of waters... and 18 Shot from the heights of Enitharrnon Relief and white-line etching with colour printing and hand colouring Library of Congress. Lessing J. Rosenwald collection, 1806 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Europe, A Prophecy (Copy A) (installation views) 1794 Book, 17 plates on 17 leaves Open to Plate 2, title page Colour-printed relief etching in dark brown with pen and black ink, oil and watercolour on paper Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Europe, A Prophecy relates contemporary historical events – specifically the French Revolution – in an epic, symbolic form. As Blake’s biographer Alexander Gilchrist (1828-1861) observed of the book: ‘It is hard to describe poems wherein the dramatis personae are giant shadows, gloomy phantoms; the scene, the realms of space; the time, of such corresponding vastness, that eighteen hundred years pass as a dream’. Catherine Blake is likely to have coloured many of the plates in this copy, including the title page. This copy, may be that bought from Blake by the painter George Romney (1734-1802).
Label text
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) First Book of Urizen pl. 6 ‘I sought Pleasure & found Pain, Unntennable’ 1796, printed c. 1818 Etching with paint, watercolour and ink on paper Tate. Purchased with funds provided by the Art Fund, Tate Members, Tate Patrons, Tate Fund and individual donors 2009 Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) The First Book of Urizen (Copy G) (installation views) 1794, printed c. 1818 27 leaves, open to plate number 14 Relief etching printed in yellow brown with watercolour and gold Library of Congress. Lessing J. Rosenwald collection, 1807 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
During his lifetime, Blake’s books were appreciated by collectors for their visual qualities far more than for their political and literary content. The First Book of Urizen was first printed in 1794. It was already strongly visual. In this new copy, printed in around 1818, Blake has enhanced this full-page image with intense colouring and gold.
Label text
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Copy H) (installation view) c. 1790 Book, 27 plates on 15 leaves Open to title page Relief etching with hand-colouring The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Copy B) (installation views) c. 1790 Book, 27 plates on 15 leaves Open to A Memorable Fancy Relief etched plates in coloured inks with glue-based pigments and hand-colouring paper Bodlieian Libraries, University of Oxford Photos: Marcus Bunyan
A Memorable Fancy describes Blake’s invention of relief etching in symbolic terms. His text does little to explain his process practically. Blake’s commitment to individualism and rebellious nature are present in this description of art-making as an experimental and inspired process. This copy belonged to the scholar and collector Francis Douce (1757-1834) and may be in his original binding.
Label text
Relief etching
Blake conceived his technique of relief etching in around 1788. He claimed this was under the inspiration of his brother Robert, who had died in 1787. The technical details of his method have long fascinated and frustrated scholars and collectors and remain debated.
Engraving and etching involve making lines in a copper plate which are filled with ink to create the printed image. Relief etching, on the other hand, involves using acid to eat away areas of the plate that you want to leave unprinted. The remaining surfaces are inked and printed. Relief etching allowed Blake to combine hand-written texts and images on a single plate. These were normally entirely separate processes. Blake also experimented in printing with colours, and added pen and ink, watercolour and later on gold to create more dense, painterly images.
Wall text from the exhibition
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) There is no Natural Religion (Copy B) (installation view) c. 1788 (composition date) c. 1794 (print date) Book, 11 plates on 11 leaves Open to Plate 10. I Mans Perceptions are not Bounded… Colour-printed relief etching on paper Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
This collection of short philosophical statements was one of Blake’s first experiments in relief etching. This copy, printed in coloured inks, was produced in 1794.
Label text
Room 2
Making prints, making a living
“I curse & bless Engraving alternately because it takes so much time & is so untractable. tho capable of such beauty & perfection” ~ William Blake
Blake was trained as a reproductive engraver. This exacting craft involved copying an image by cutting fine lines onto a metal plate so that it could be printed and reproduced many times. Blake enjoyed the precision of this work. He gained a good reputation and engraving provided him with an income throughout his life. He was sometimes employed to design as well as engrave illustrations, and for a short period from 1784 ran his own print publishing business with his friend and fellow engraver James Parker.
While Blake admired the uncompromising qualities of older prints, the market favoured more obviously decorative techniques. Blake could adapt his style, but he found the limitations of commercial work frustrating.
Around 1788 Blake invented a new form of printmaking, ‘relief etching’. He described the technique in poetic rather than practical terms so his exact methods remain mysterious. The process allowed Blake to print in colour and combine texts and images. Blake used the technique to create a succession of visionary books. These engaged with the most pressing moral and political questions of the day, including revolution, sexual freedom and the slave trade. Blake’s illuminated books combined poetry and images in experimental ways. His images rarely illustrate the text directly. He also printed some of the images separately without words. Later in life Blake continued to print copies for fellow artists and rare book collectors, adding richer colours and gold to make them more visually enticing.
Wall text from the exhibition
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion (installation view) c. 1810 Engraving using carbon ink on paper The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion (installation view) c. 1810 Engraving using carbon ink on paper The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Los and Orc c. 1792-1793 Ink and watercolour on paper 217 × 295 mm Tate. Presented by Mrs Jane Samuel in memory of her husband 1962 Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)
This watercolour represents a turning-point in Blake’s art because it depicts a subject taken from his invented mythology which he used across the illuminated books. The figures appear to be the characters Los, representing imagination, and the chained Orc, the spirit of rebellion.
Wall text from the exhibition
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Hell beneath is Moved for thee, to Meet thee at thy Coming (installation view) Isaiah, xiv, 9 c. 1780-1785 Ink and grey wash on toned paper Lent by her Majesty The Queen Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Lucifer and the Pope in Hell (installation view) c. 1794-1796 Etching or engraving printed in colour with gum or glue-based pigments and hand-finished with watercolours and ink on paper The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens Photo: Marcus Bunyan
This image was produced using Blake’s relief etching method, printed in colour with additional pen and ink and watercolour, to create a dense, painterly effect. It is based on an earlier drawing.
Wall text from the exhibition
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Frontispiece to ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion’ (installation view) c. 1795 Relief etching, ink and watercolour on paper Tate
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Plate 4 of ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion’ (installation view) c. 1795 Relief etching, ink and watercolour on paper Tate Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Frontispiece to ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion’ (installation view) c. 1795 Relief etching, ink and watercolour on paper Tate Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Small Book of Designs: Plate 7, ‘Of life on his forsaken mountains’ (installation view) 1794 Colour-printed relief etching with hand-colouring, on paper Lent by the British Museum, London
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Small Book of Designs: Plate 8, ‘dark seascape with figure in water’ (installation view) 1794 Colour-printed relief etching with hand-colouring, on paper Lent by the British Museum, London Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Small Book of Designs: Plate 7, ‘Of life on his forsaken mountains’ (installation view) 1794 Colour-printed relief etching with hand-colouring, on paper Lent by the British Museum, London Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) A Small Book of Designs copy A object 7 The First Book of Urizen plate 23 1796 Colour-printed relief etching with hand-colouring, on paper The William Blake Archive, The British Museum Wikipedia Commons, Public Domain
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Small Book of Designs: Plate 8, ‘dark seascape with figure in water’ (installation view) 1794 Colour-printed relief etching with hand-colouring, on paper Lent by the British Museum, London Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Small Book of Designs: Plate 9, ‘Lo, a shadow of horror’ (installation view) 1794 Colour-printed relief etching with hand-colouring, on paper Lent by The British Museum, London Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Small Book of Designs: Plate 11, ‘Gowned Male Seen from behind’ (installation view) 1794 Colour-printed relief etching with hand-colouring, on paper Lent by The British Museum, London Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) The Book of Thel, Plate 6 ‘Doth God take Care of these’ (installation views) 1796, c. 1818 Etching with paint, watercolour and ink on paper Tate. Purchased with funds provided by the Art Fund, Tate Members,Tate Patrons, Tate Fund and individual donors 2009 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Copy A, Plate 7 in ‘The First Book of Urizen’ (installation view) 1794 Colour relief etching predominantly in black, grey and pink, with hand-colouring, on paper Lent by The British Museum, London Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Copy A, plate 12, Design from ‘Preludium’ in ‘The First Book of Urizen’ (installation view) 1794 Colour-printed relief etchings with hand-colouring, on paper Lent by The British Museum, London Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) First Book of Urizen, Plate 10 ‘Every thing is an attempt, To be Human’ (installation views) 1796, c. 1818 Etching with paint, watercolour and ink on paper Tate. Purchased with funds provided by the Art Fund, Tate Members, Tate Patrons, Tate Fund and individual donors 2009 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) First Book of Urizen, Plate 10 ‘Every thing is an attempt, To be Human’ 1796, c. 1818 Etching with paint, watercolour and ink on paper Tate. Purchased with funds provided by the Art Fund, Tate Members, Tate Patrons, Tate Fund and individual donors 2009 Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)
“I was in a Printing house in Hell, & saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.”
William Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ c. 1790
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) First Book of Urizen, Plate 15 (installation views) 1796, c. 1818 Etching with paint, watercolour and ink on paper Tate. Purchased with funds provided by the Art Fund, Tate Members, Tate Patrons, Tate Fund and individual donors 2009 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) First Book of Urizen, Plate 15 ‘Vegetating in fibres of Blood’ 1796, c. 1818 Etching with paint, watercolour and ink on paper Tate. Purchased with funds provided by the Art Fund, Tate Members, Tate Patrons, Tate Fund and individual donors 2009 Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) First Book of Urizen, Plate 17 ‘Is the Female Death, Become new Life’ (installation views) 1796, c. 1818 Etching with paint, watercolour and ink on paper Tate. Purchased with funds provided by the Art Fund, Tate Members, Tate Patrons, Tate Fund and individual donors 2009 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) First Book of Urizen, Plate 17 ‘Is the Female Death, Become new Life’ 1796, c. 1818 Etching with paint, watercolour and ink on paper Tate. Purchased with funds provided by the Art Fund, Tate Members, Tate Patrons, Tate Fund and individual donors 2009 Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Songs of Innocence (1789), Songs of Experience (1793) and the combined Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) are the best known of Blake’s illuminated books. He sold more copies of these books than any other (although he probably printed no more than 30 in his lifetime).
The poems deal with themes of childhood and morality, and include striking observations about suffering and social injustice. The visual style is highly decorative. The dense crowding of texts and borders is suggestive of illustrations to children’s books or even embroidered samplers.
Wall text
Installation view of the exhibition William Blake at Tate Britain, London Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition William Blake at Tate Britain, London Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) America, A Prophecy (Copy M) Plate 13, ‘Fiery the Angels Rose…’ (installation view) 1793 18 plates on 18 leaves, disbound Colour-printed relief etching in brown with ink and watercolour on paper Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The American War of Independence (1775-1783) was the key historical event of Blake’s youth. It shattered the British elite’s assumptions that they could rule over a global, English-speaking empire. For many others, including Blake, it was a heroic overturning of the oppressive old order. Blake’s poem deals with historical events in mythical terms. The central character is Orc, the spirit of revolution, who pursues the ‘shadowy daughter of Urthona’. It was produced at a time when the French Revolution inspired both hope and fear that revolution would spread across Europe.
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Room 3
Patronage and independence
Throughout his life Blake depended upon the support of family and friends. These included several fellow-artists and amateurs, including John and Ann Flaxman, Thomas Stothard and George Cumberland. In the 1790s Blake started selling works to Thomas Butts, a senior civil servant. Butts became his most important patron, eventually owning up to 200 works by the artist. The Rev. Joseph Thomas also commissioned series of watercolours illustrating Milton and Shakespeare. The wealthy poet William Hayley was another important supporter. In 1800-1803 Blake went to work for Hayley, moving with Catherine to Sussex.
The move opened up new connections, with the Rev. John Johnson and Elizabeth Ilive, Countess of Egremont. The support of Flaxman, Butts, Hayley and their friends gave Blake a degree of financial stability. Blake’s patrons were well-off and socially established, much more so than the artist. They admired the artist’s unconventional character and independent spirit. But Blake resented being their employee and the advice they sometimes offered. As a result these relationships often became strained.
Wall text from the exhibition
Edward Young (British, 1683-1765) Night Thoughts (installation view) 1797 Book, 43 plates on 43 leaves Engravings with hand-colouring By courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Blake produced over 530 watercolours for Edward Young’s long poem on ‘life, death and immortality’. He created bold designs in large margins around each sheet of the printed text. These often give literal form to ideas in the text. Publisher Richard Edwards commissioned Blake, but later abandoned the project and closed down his business. Blake had asked for over £100 for the designs but was paid only £21. He despaired, writing in 1799: ‘I am laid by in a corner as if I did not Exist’. This copy was hand-coloured by Blake or by Catherine Blake.
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William Blake (British, 1757-1827) The Christ Child Asleep on the Cross (installation view) 1799-1800 Tempera on canvas Lent by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Christ Blessing the Little Children (installation views) 1799 Tempera on canvas Tate. Presented by the executors of W. Graham Robertson through the Art Fund 1949 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Christ Blessing the Little Children 1799 Tempera on canvas Tate. Presented by the executors of W. Graham Robertson through the Art Fund 1949 Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)
This painting is from of a group of fifty illustrations to the Bible commissioned by Blake’s patron, Thomas Butts. Its subject is taken from chapter 10 of St Mark’s Gospel. Christ, seated beneath a spreading tree, blesses children brought to him while he was preaching. To the left is one of his disciples, who tries to send the children away. Christ tells the disciples:
Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God… Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.
Gallery label, August 2004
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) The Body of Christ Borne to the Tomb (installation views) c. 1799-1800 Tempera on canvas mounted onto cardboard Tate. Presented by Francis T. Palgrave 1884 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
The frame is original and may even have been chosen by Blake.
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) The Body of Christ Borne to the Tomb c. 1799-1800 Tempera on canvas mounted onto cardboard Tate. Presented by Francis T. Palgrave 1884 Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)
This tempera is very well preserved, mainly because it was painted on thin linen canvas, stuck onto thin cardboard. This is stiff enough to reduce the cracking that develops on flexible canvas. It also made it unnecessary to add the animal glue lining which has spoilt the opaque white effect of Blake’s chalk preparatory layer in many temperas. As a result, Blake’s delicate painted details can still be seen as he intended.
This is the only Blake tempera in this room in a frame dating from the time it was painted. Blake may have chosen the frame design himself.
Gallery label, August 2004
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea (installation views) c. 1805 Ink with watercolour over graphite on paper National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection, 1943 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea c. 1805 Ink with watercolour over graphite on paper National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection, 1943 Wikipedia Commons, Public Domain
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) The Number of the Beast is 666 (installation views) c. 1805 Ink and watercolour on paper The Rosenbach, Philadelphia Photos: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) The Number of the Beast is 666 c. 1805 Ink and watercolour on paper The Rosenbach, Philadelphia Wikipedia Commons, Public Domain
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Satan in his Original Glory: ‘Thou wast Perfect till Iniquity was Found in Thee’ (installation views) c. 1805 Ink and watercolour on paper Tate. Presented by the executors of W. Graham Robertson through the Art Fund 1949 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
This watercolour shows how such works have changed over time. There is a strip of much stronger blue colour at the bottom right edge, in an area which had been masked from the light in the past.
This watercolour shows Satan as he once was, a perfect part of God’s creation, before his fall from grace. His orb and sceptre symbolise his role as Prince of this World. It is also an extreme example of the damaging effects of over-exposure to light. The sky was originally an intense blue, now only visible at the lower right edge. The only colours which have survived unaltered are the vermilion red Blake used for the flesh, and red ochre in Satan’s wings. The paper has yellowed considerably. There is no evidence left of any yellow gamboge or pinkish red lakes.
Gallery label, September 2004
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Christ Girding Himself with Strength (installation view) c. 1805 Chalk and watercolour over pencil on paper 280 × 325 mm Bristol Culture: Bristol Museums & Art Gallery Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) David Delivered out of Many Waters c. 1805 Ink and watercolour on paper Tate. Presented by George Thomas Saul 1878 Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)
This work shows how Blake responded visually to textual sources. It is an illustration to Psalm 18, in which David (at the bottom of the image with his arms stretched wide) calls out to God for salvation from his enemies. Christ appears above, riding upon seven cherubim (angels), not one as in the text. Blake’s gentle, linear style, formal composition and free interpretation of a written source made him attractive to many modern artists. Paul Nash saw Blake as representing a British imaginative tradition.
Gallery label, August 2004
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) The Crucifixion: ‘Behold Thy Mother’ c. 1805 Ink and watercolour on paper Tate. Presented by the executors of W. Graham Robertson through the Art Fund 1949 Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)
Blake often treated subjects from Jerusalem’s history. Christian thought is centred on Christ’s crucifixion at Calvary outside the city, when he died to redeem mankind. His cross, his resurrection and return to earth three days after his death are central to Stanley Spencer’s Resurrection of the Soldiers altarpiece at Sandham; sketches for this are shown in the display case to your left.
Spencer believed that the soldiers had a ‘perfect understanding’ of the sacrifice they had to make. This suggests that both Blake’s ‘Mental Fight’ to build the Jerusalem of peace in England, and the soldiers’ physical fight are equally valid.
Gallery label, July 2008
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) The Magdalene at the Sepulchre (installation views) c. 1805 Pen, ink and watercolour on paper 427 × 311 mm Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection Photos: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) The Angel Rolling away the Stone c. 1805 Watercolour on paper Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Morse gift
Two angels in white the one at the head, and the other at the feet / Matw. cn. 28th v. 2nd And below there was a great earthquake, for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door. /17.
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) The Angel Rolling away the Stone (detail) c. 1805 Watercolour on paper Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Morse gift
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Illustrations to Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ Plate 1: ‘Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels’ (Thomas set) (installation views) 1807 12 designs on 12 sheets Ink and watercolour on paper The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens Photos: Marcus Bunyan
John Milton’s epic poem describes Adam and Eve’s banishment from the Garden of Eden. Satan, the rebellious fallen angel, is a major character. Blake made these illustrations for the Rev. Joseph Thomas, following an introduction from Flaxman.
There are three sets: the Thomas set (1807), the Butts set (1808) and the incomplete Linnell set (1822).
The Thomas set
The paintings of the Thomas set are each approximately 10x 8.25 inches. They were commissioned by the Reverend Joseph Thomas at an unrecorded date, sometime before 1807. Although the sheets were trimmed at some time, obliterating the date from several, some still retain the date of 1807, establishing the year of their completion. Thomas’ grandson inherited them from his father, and sold them at Sotheby’s in 1872. By 1876 they were in the collection of Alfred Aspland, who by 1885 took them to Sotheby’s again, dispersing the set among several buyers. Henry Huntington reunited the works in 1914, and today they are still in the collection of the Huntington Library.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Reverend Joseph Thomas
The Rev. Joseph Thomas of Epsom, Surrey, was a clergyman and friend of Flaxman. Flaxman put him and Blake in touch, leading to a series of commissions. Thomas had married an heiress, Millicent Pankhurst. He held no church appointment and was free to pursue his artistic and scholarly interests.
Blake produced several series of watercolours for Thomas illustrating the poetry of the 17th-century writer John Milton, and Shakespeare’s plays. Thomas also purchased a few published works by Blake.
Wall text from the exhibition
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Illustrations to Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ Plate 1: ‘Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels’ (Thomas set) 1807 12 designs on 12 sheets Ink and watercolour on paper The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens Google Art Project, Wikipedia Commons, Public Domain
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Illustrations to Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ Plate 2: ‘Satan, Sin, and Death: Satan Comes to the Gates of Hell’ (Thomas set) 1807 12 designs on 12 sheets Ink and watercolour on paper The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens Google Art Project, Wikipedia Commons, Public Domain
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Illustrations to Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ Plate 4: ‘Satan Spying on Adam and Eve’s Descent into Paradise’ (Thomas set) 1807 12 designs on 12 sheets Ink and watercolour on paper The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens Google Art Project, Wikipedia Commons, Public Domain
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Illustrations to Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ Plate 7: ‘The Rout of the Rebel Angels’ (Thomas set) (installation view) 1807 12 designs on 12 sheets Ink and watercolour on paper The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Illustrations to Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ Plate 7: ‘The Rout of the Rebel Angels’ (Thomas set) 1807 12 designs on 12 sheets Ink and watercolour on paper The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens Google Art Project, Wikipedia Commons, Public Domain
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Illustrations to Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ Plate 8: ‘The Creation of Eve’ (Thomas set) (installation views) 1807 12 designs on 12 sheets Ink and watercolour on paper The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens Photos: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Illustrations to Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ Plate 8: ‘The Creation of Eve’ (Thomas set) 1807 12 designs on 12 sheets Ink and watercolour on paper The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens Google Art Project, Wikipedia Commons, Public Domain
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Illustrations to Milton’s Hymn ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ Plate 2: ‘The Angels appearing to the Shepherds’ (installation views) 1809 6 designs on 6 sheets Graphite, ink and watercolour on paper The Whitworth, The University of Manchester Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Blake was paid two pounds for each of these six designs by Thomas, twice what he was paid by Butts for the individual Bible watercolours. He made another set of these illustrations for Thomas Butts. Milton’s poem celebrates the birth of Christ, and the retreat of pagan and evil forces.
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Illustrations to Milton’s Hymn ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ Plate 3: ‘The Descent of Typhon and the Gods into Hell’ (installation views) 1809 6 designs on 6 sheets Graphite, ink and watercolour on paper The Whitworth, The University of Manchester Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Tate Britain Millbank, London SW1P 4RG United Kingdom Phone: +44 20 7887 8888
Part 2 on this exceptional exhibition. Of particular interest here are:
the inspired paintings and drawings by Jeanne Mammen of Berlin nightlife which documents “the changing role of women and offer rare images of queer female desire.” Her work, associated with the New Objectivity and Symbolism movements, is incisive and sympathetic in its observation of difference and “depravity”. Her line is strong and the characterisation, assured;
Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler’s “scenes of Hamburg after dark [which] convey a raw sense of possibility through bold line, clashing colour and startling imagery.” The attitude of the hands in the painting Lissy (1931, below) balanced by the simplicity of the chair at left, and the furious line and bleeding, washes of watercolour of the men at the table at right – replete with their protruding, predatory teeth – make this a compelling image.
Paris: Loïe Fuller 1890s wall text Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Unknown photographer (attributed to Falk Studio) Loïe Fuller c. 1901 Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC
1895-1908 Loie Fuller’s Serpentine Dance (highlights from the greatest movie pioneers’ films)
Loie Fuller was a pioneer of modern dance and of theatrical lighting effects. She developed this dance in 1891 and combined her choreography with silk costumes illuminated by multi-colored lighting of her own design. In several of the Serpentine Dance movies her lighting has been reinterpreted through hand-colored effects. Fuller also had a successful Fire Dance of which elements are often incorporated in filmed Serpentine Dance performances (yet rarelymentioned).
It is unclear whether any performance by Loie Fuller herself has ever been filmed. Possibly all of the featured dancers are imitators, although Segundo de Chomon’s 1902 film title “Loie Fuller” makes a strong claim.
Text from the YouTube website
Magnificent! Not Loïe Fuller but one of her many imitators. She refused to be captured on film.
Installation views of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery, London showing the work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, 1864-1901) Miss Loïe Fuller 1893 Bibliothèque de l’Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Collections Jacques Doucet Inv. no. NUM EM TOULOUSE-LAUTREC 49 e Courtesy Bibliothèque de l’Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Collections Jacques Doucet
Installation views of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery, London showing Henri Rivière and Henry Somm’s shadow theatre and wall text Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Adolphe-Leon Wilette (French, 1857-1926) La Vierge verte (The Green Virgin) (installation view) c. 1881 Oil on canvas Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Jane Alison, Head of Visual Arts, Barbican, said: “Into the Night casts a spotlight on some of the most electrifying cabarets and clubs of the modern era. Whether a creative haven, intoxicating stage or liberal hangout, all were magnets for artists, designers and performers to come together, collaborate and express themselves freely. Capturing the essence of these global incubators of experimentation and cross-disciplinarity, immersive 1:1 scale interiors will take the visitor on a captivating journey of discovery.”
Into the Night begins in Paris, on the eve of the 20th century, with two thrilling and iconic locations of the avant-garde. The theatrical shadow plays of the Chat Noir in the 1880s are brought to life through original silhouettes and works that decorated the interior of the cabaret, which acted as a forum for satire and debate for figures such as founder Rodolphe Salis, artist Henri Rivière and composer Erik Satie. The captivating serpentine dances of Loïe Fuller staged at the Folies Bergère in the 1890s were trail-blazing experiments in costume, light and movement. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec captured her performances in his extraordinary series of delicately hand-coloured lithographs, brought together for the exhibition. Visitors will encounter the immersive “Gesamtkunstwerk” (total work of art) design of the Cabaret Fledermaus (1907) in Vienna by the Wiener Werkstätte, where experimental cabaret productions were staged. The exhibition includes original documentation of Oskar Kokoschka’s exuberant puppet theatre and Gertrude Barrison’s expressionist dance.
The Cave of the Golden Calf (1912), an underground haunt in Soho epitomising decadence and hedonism, is evoked through designs for the interior by British artists Spencer Gore and Eric Gill, as well as Wyndham Lewis’s highly stylised programmes for the eclectic performance evenings – advertised at the time as encompassing “the picturesque dances of the South, its fervid melodies, Parisian wit, English humour.” In Zurich, the radical atmosphere of the Cabaret Voltaire (1916) is manifested through absurdist sound poetry and fantastical masks that deconstruct body and language, evoking the anarchic performances by Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings and Marcel Janco. This is the birthplace of Dada, where humour, chaos and ridicule reign. Two significant clubs in Rome provide insights into the electrifying dynamism of Futurism in Italy in the 1920s. Giacomo Balla’s mesmerising Bal Tic Tac (1921) is summoned by colour-saturated designs for the club’s interior, capturing the swirling movement of dancers. Also on show are drawings and furnishings for Fortunato Depero’s spectacular inferno-inspired Cabaret del Diavolo (1922) which occupied three floors representing heaven, purgatory and hell. Depero’s flamboyant tapestry writhes with dancing demons, expressing the club’s motto “Tutti all’inferno!!! (Everyone to hell!!!)”.
After a period of restraint in Germany during the First World War, the 1920s heralded an era of liberation and the relaxation of censorship laws. Numerous clubs and bars in metropolitan cities, such as Berlin, playing host to heady cabaret revues and daring striptease; the notorious synchronised Tiller Girls are captured in Karl Hofer’s iconic portrait. Major works by often overlooked female artists such as Jeanne Mammen and Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, as well as George Grosz, Otto Dix and Max Beckmann, capture the pulsating energy of these nightclubs and the alternative lifestyles that flourished within them during the 1920s and 1930s. During the same time in New York, the literary and jazz scenes thrived and co-mingled in the predominantly African American neighbourhood of Harlem, where black identity was re-forged and debated. Paintings and prints by Aaron Douglas and Jacob Lawrence convey the vibrant atmosphere and complex racial and sexual politics of the time, while poetry by Langston Hughes and early cinema featuring Duke Ellington shed light on the rich range of creative expression thriving within the city.
Into the Night also celebrates the lesser known but highly influential Mbari Artists and Writers Club, founded in the early 1960s in Nigeria. Focusing on two of the club’s key locations, in Ibadan and Osogbo, the exhibition explores how they were founded as laboratories for postcolonial artistic practices, providing a platform for a dazzling range of activities – including open-air dance and theatre performances, featuring ground breaking Yoruba operas by Duro Ladipo and Fela Kuti’s Afro-jazz; poetry and literature readings; experimental art workshops; and pioneering exhibitions by African and international artists such as Colette Omogbai, Ibrahim El-Salahi and Uche Okeke. Meanwhile in Tehran, Rasht 29 emerged in1966 as a creative space for avant-garde painters, poets, musicians and filmmakers to freely discuss their practice. Spontaneous performances were celebrated and works by artists like Parviz Tanavoli and Faramarz Pilaram hung in the lounge while a soundtrack including Led Zeppelin and the Beatles played constantly.
The exhibition is curated and organised by Barbican Centre, London, in collaboration with the Belvedere, Vienna.
Press release from the Barbican Art Gallery [Online] Cited 28/12/2019
Berlin: Weimar Nightlife 1920s-30s wall text from the exhibition Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Jeanne Mammen (German, 1890-1976) Bierseidelbetrachtung I (The Contemplative Drinkers I) (installation views) c. 1929 Watercolour and pencil on paper Ömer Koç Collection Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Jeanne Mammen (German, 1890-1976) Untitled (Vor dem Auftritt) (Before the Performance) (installation views) c. 1928 Jeanne Mammen Foundation at Stadtmuseum Berlin Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969) Anita Berber (installation view) 1925 Pastel on paper Private collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Otto Dix met the 26-year-old cabaret dancer and silent film star Anita Berber in DÅ«sseldorf in 1925. Berber was among the most provocative performers of her time, appearing at major Berlin venues like the Wintergarten and the Apollo, as well as the political cabaret Schall und Rauch and the lesbian club Topkeller. In her notorious dance ‘Cocaine’, accompanied by Camille Saint-Saëns’ Valse mignonne (1896), Berber played a sex worker and addict, wearing a leather corset with her breast exposed. Simulating trembles of pain, she dances spasms of hallucination before collapsing on the floor. Despite her theatrical makeup, Dix’s portrait offers a more intimate side of Berber.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery, London showing on the left, the work of Dodo Burgner and on the right, the work of George Grosz. Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Dodo (Dodo Burgner, German, 1927-1933) Revue neger (Josephine Baker) (installation view) c. 1926 Gouache over pencil on cardboard Collection Krümmer, Hamburg Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Dodo (Dodo Burgner, German, 1927-1933) The Fortune Teller, published in ULK (installation views) February 1929 Gouache over pencil on cardboard Collection Krümmer, Hamburg Photos: Marcus Bunyan
George Grosz (German, 1893-1959) Schönheit, dich will ich preisen (Beauty, Thee Will I Praise) (installation views) 1923 Offset lithograph Publisher: Malik-Verlag, Berlin Printer: Kunstanstalt Dr. Selle & Co. A.G. Berlin Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery, London Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery, London showing at left, Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler’s Ausblick im Nachtlokal (View of a Nightclub) 1930 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler (German, 1899-1940) Ausblick im Nachtlokal (View of a Nightclub) (installation view) 1930 Pastel on paper Private collection, Berlin Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler Ausblick im Nachtlokal (View of a Nightclub) wall text Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler (German, 1899-1940) Ausblick im Nachtlokal (View of a Nightclub) 1930 Private collection, Berlin
Installation view of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery, London showing at left, showing at left, Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler’s Lissy (1931) and at right, Karl Hofer’s Tiller Girls (before 1927) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler (German, 1899-1940) Lissy (installation views) 1931 Watercolour and pencil on paper Private collection. Courtesy Städel Museum, Frankfurt Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler (born Anna Frieda Wächtler; 4 December 1899 – 31 July 1940) was a German painter of the avant-garde whose works were banned as “degenerate art”, and in some cases destroyed, in Nazi Germany. She was murdered in a former psychiatric institution at Sonnenstein castle in Pirna under Action T4, a forced euthanasia program of Nazi Germany. Since 2000, a memorial centre for the T4 program in the house commemorates her life and work in a permanent exhibition.
Life
Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler grew up in a middle-class family, but left at the age of 16 to study at the Royal Arts School Dresden from 1915 to 1918 (fashion, then applied graphics). From 1916 to 1919, she also attended drawing and painting courses at the Dresden Art Academy. She came into contact with the Dresden Secession Group 1919 and became part of the circle of friends around Otto Dix, Otto Griebel, and Conrad Felixmüller. Renting part of the studio of the latter near the Dresden city center she made a living with batiks, postcards and illustrations.
In June 1921, she married the painter and opera singer Kurt Lohse [de], following him to Görlitz in 1922 and in 1925 to Hamburg. The marriage was a difficult one and the couple separated several times in the following years. In 1926, Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler joined the Federation of female Hamburgian artists and art lovers; in 1928. she was able to participate in some exhibitions of the New Objectivity.
In 1929, she suffered a nervous breakdown because of financial and partnership difficulties and was committed to a psychiatric institution in Hamburg-Friedrichsberg. During the two months’ stay she painted the Friedrichsberg heads, a piece of work consisting of about 60 drawings and pastels, mainly portraits of fellow patients. After her recovery and a final separation from Kurt Lohse (in 1926), she had a very creative phase. She painted numerous paintings of Hamburg’s harbor, scenes from the life of workers and prostitutes, and pitiless self-portraits. But despite some exhibitions, sales, and smaller grants, she lived in grinding poverty.
Due to financial problems and increasing social isolation, she returned to her parents’ home in Dresden by midyear 1931. When her mental state worsened her father admitted her to the state mental home at Arnsdorf in 1932. There she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. From 1932 to 1935 she was still creatively active, drawing portraits and creating arts and crafts. After Kurt Lohse divorced her in May 1935 she was incapacitated due to “incurable insanity”.
After refusing to consent to a sterilisation, she was denied the permission to go out of the hospital any more. In December 1935, she underwent a forced surgical sterilisation in the Dresden-Friedrichstadt women’s hospital on the grounds of Nazi eugenicist policies. After this traumatic event she never painted again. In 1940 she was deported to the former psychiatric institution at Pirna-Sonnenstein (located in the Sonnenstein castle in Pirna), where, on 31 July, she was murdered along with the majority of the other residents as part of the Nazi “euthanasia” program, Action T4. The official cause of death was “pneumonia with myocardial insufficiency”. In the years of 1940 and 1941, a total of 13,720 mainly mentally ill or handicapped people were gassed by Nazis in this institution formerly well known for its humanistic traditions.
Installation view of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery, London showing at left, Karl Hofer’s Tiller Girls (before 1927) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Karl Hofer (German, 1878-1955) Tiller Girls (installation view) before 1927 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery, London showing at left, Karl Hofer’s Tiller Girls (before 1927, above); and at third from left, Erna Schmidt-Caroll’s Chansonette (Singer) (c. 1928, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery, London showing the work of George Grosz and Max Beckmann Photo: Marcus Bunyan
George Grosz (German, 1893-1959) Menschen in Cáfe (People in a Cáfe) (installation view) 1917 Black ink and pen on paper On loan from the Trustees of the British Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Max Beckmann (German, 1884-1950) Nackttanz (Striptease), from Berliner Reise (Trip to Berlin) (installation view) 1922 Lithograph, one from a portfolio of eleven (including cover) Publisher: J.B. Neumann, Berlin Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Jeanne Mammen (German, 1890-1976) Sie reprasentiert! (She Represents!), published in Simplicissimus vol. 32, no 47, February 1928 Printed magazine Jeanne Mammen Foundation at Stadtmuseum Berlin Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Jeanne Mammen (German, 1890-1976) Maskenball (Masked Ball), published in Jugend vol. 34, no 5, January 1929 Printed magazine Jeanne Mammen Foundation at Stadtmuseum Berlin Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Jeanne Mammen (German, 1890-1976) Fasting (Carnival), published in Simplicissimus vol. 34, no 46, February 1930 Printed magazine Jeanne Mammen Foundation at Stadtmuseum Berlin Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Unknown photographer ‘Slide on the Razor’, performance as part of the Haller Revue ‘Under and Over’, Berlin, 1923 Courtesy Feral House
Ibadan & Osogbo Mbari Clubs 1961-66 wall text Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery, London showing at left, Twins Seven-Seven Devil’s Dog (1964) and at right, Twins Seven-Seven THE BEAUTIFUL LADY and THE FULLBODIED GENTLEMAN THAT REDUCED TO HEAD (1967) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Twins Seven-Seven Devil’s Dog (installation view detail) 1964 Ink, gouache and varnishon paper Iwalewahaus, Universitat Bayreuth Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Twins Seven-Seven THE BEAUTIFUL LADY and THE FULLBODIED GENTLEMAN THAT REDUCED TO HEAD (installation views) 1967 Gouache on paper Iwalewahaus, Universitat Bayreuth Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery, London showing at left, Muraina Oyelami’s Burial Ground (1967) with Georgina Beier’s Gelede (1966) third from right Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Muraina Oyelami (Nigerian, b. 1940) Burial Ground (installation views) 1967 Oil on board Collection of M.K. Wolford Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery, London showing at second left, Valente Malangatana Ngwenya’s Untitled (1961) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Valente Malangatana Ngwenya (Mozambican, 1936-2011) Untitled (installation views) 1961 Oil on canvas Iwalewahaus, Universität Bayreuth Photos: Marcus Bunyan
The programme at the Mbari clubs was highly international: in addition to artists from across Africa, those from Europe, the Caribbean and the UA (particularly African Americans) were often invited to participate. When Mozambican artist Malangatana exhibited in Ibadan in 1962, Uli Beier’s accompanying text described his work as ‘wild and powerful but it is more than that. Far from being repelled by the scenes of horror, we are brought under an irresistible spell. For Malangatana’s work also contains a strong element of human sympathy and suffering and agony… he is full of stories. The artist was closely involved in the struggle against Portuguese rule in Mozambique and many of his works can be seen as allegories of colonial oppression.
Wall text from the exhibition
Colette Omogbai (Nigeria, b. 1942) Agony (installation view) 1963 Oil on hardboard Iwalewahaus, Universität Bayreuth Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Collete Omogbai held her first solo exhibition at the Mbari club in Ibadan in 1963, while still a student. Deconstructing the body ith saturated colours and jagged shapes, Agony conveys great emotional intensity. Omogbai’s highly expressive forms reflect the modernist ideas advocated in her 1965 manifesto, ‘Man Loves What is “Sweet” and Obvious’, in which she parodied mainstream taste: “‘Give us reality’, Man proclaims, ‘if possible, the reality as real as that of Bouguereau… No touch of black’.” Like many of the works in this section, it was acquired by Mbari founder Ulli Beier and later entered the collection of the University of Bayreuth in Germany.
Installation views of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery showing some of the publishing output of the Mbari clubs and wall text Photos: Marcus Bunyan
London Cave of the Golden Calf wall text Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Spencer Gore (British, 1878-1914) Design for Tiger Hunting Mural in the Cabaret Theatre Club (installation view) 1912 Oil and pencil on card Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Spencer Gore (British, 1878-1914) Design for Deer Hunting Mural in the Cabaret Theatre Club(installation view) 1912 Oil and chalk on paper Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund Photo: Marcus Bunyan
None of the original decorations from the Cave of the Golden Calf survive except for Eric Gill’s carved bull calf. Contemporaneous reports, however, describe their collective impact as intense, conveying a hedonistic energy. Gore’s murals depicted an Arcadian hunt, with frisking tigers and deep portrayed in glowing colours. The Times recounted ‘mural decorations representing we should not care to say what precise stage beyond impressionism – they would easily, however, turn into appalling goblins after a little too much supper in the cave’. The artists then at the forefront of modernism in Britain, were dubbed ‘Troglodytes’ or ‘Cave-dwellers’ by the press.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery showing some of the works by Wyndham Lewis (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Wyndham Lewis (English, 1882-1957) Kermesse (installation views) 1912 Gouache, watercolour, pen and black ink, black wash and graphite on paper Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Wyndham Lewis designed the cabaret’s programme and posted as well as some of its interior decorations, which are now lost. His large oil painting, Kermesse (1912), whose dynamic figures evoked a carnival spirit hung on the club’s wall; only this drawing now survives. Along with other British modernist contemporaries, Lewis was fascinated by dance during this period, producing multiple works that may have been inspired by the cabaret’s ‘exotic’ programme.
Wall text
Wyndham Lewis (English, 1882-1957) Drop curtain design (installation views) 1912 Pencil, black in and watercolour on paper V&A Theatre and Performance, London Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Wyndham Lewis (English, 1882-1957) Indian Dance (installation view) 1912 Chalk and watercolour on paper Tate, Purchased 1955 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Harlem Jazz Clubs and Cabarets 1920s-1940s wall text Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery showing at left in the bottom image, Jacob Lawrence’s Vaudeville (1951); at second left, William H, Johnson’s Jitterbugs (III) (c. 1941); at second right, William H, Johnson’s Jitterbugs (II) (c. 1941); and at right, Edward Burra’s Savoy Ballroom, Harlem (1934) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Jacob Lawrence (American, 1917-2000) Vaudeville (installation view) 1951 Egg tempera and pencil on Fibreboard Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Photos: Marcus Bunyan
in this work, Lawrence pays tribute to his formative experiences watching vaudeville performances at the Apollo Theater as a young man during the Harlem renaissance. He later recalled, ‘I wanted a staccato-type thing – raw, sharp, rough – that’s what I tried to get’. The vibrant composition reveals Lawrence’s virtuoso handling of colour and form. The patterned backdrop comprises circles, triangles and organic forms in myriad colours, interlocking to create a syncopated, rhythmic effect. In contrast to their carnivalesque costumes and the comedic nature of vaudeville, the figure bear sorrowful expressions, perhaps reflecting the ‘melancholy-comic’ mood that contemporary Harlem writer Claude McKay identified as central to the black American experience.
Wall text from the exhibition
William H. Johnson (American, 1901-1970) Jitterbugs (III) (installation view) c. 1941 Oil on plywood Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of the Harmon Foundation Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William H. Johnson (American, 1901-1970) Jitterbugs (II) (installation view) c. 1941 Oil on paperboard Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of the Harmon Foundation Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Edward Burra (English, 1905-1976) Savoy Ballroom, Harlem (installation views) 1934 Gouache and watercolour on paper Omer Koc Collection Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Aaron Douglas (American, 1899-1979) Dance (installation view) c. 1930 Gouache on illustration board Collection of Dr Anita White Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Aaron Douglas (American, 1899-1979) Untitled (Dancers and Cityscape) (installation views) c. 1928 Ink on paper Private collection Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Tehran Rasht 29 1966-69 wall text Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery showing the Tehran Rasht 29 1966-69 section Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Kamran Diba (Iranian, b. 1937) I’m a Clever Waterman (installation view) 1966 Lithograph (reproduction of lost painting) Collection Kamran Diba Photo: Marcus Bunyan
I’m a Clever Waterman was first created during a performance by artist and architect Kamran Diba and his contemporaries, which combined movement and live music with live painting. Faramarz Pilaram added the calligraphic text, which includes the work’s enigmatic title and the number 29, reflecting the importance of the Rasht 29 club to their artistic circle. The painting was shown at the bar area at Rasht but was lost during the 1979 Iranian Revolution: only the print survives now.
Parviz Tanavoli (Iranian, b. 1937) Cage, cage, cage (installation view) 1966 (repaired 2009) Wood, metal, feather, glass, paint and light Tate Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Parviz Tanavoli (Iranian, b. 1937) Boohoo, boohoo, boohoo, or her, or a gazelle (installation view) 1966 Wood, paint, plexiglass and metal Collection Parviz Tanavoli Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Throughout the 1960s Iran’s economy was rapidly industrialising. Tanavoli began incorporating found industrial elements into his work, scouring welding shops, blacksmiths, potteries and street vendors for salvage. Boohoo, boohoo, boohoo, or her, or a gazelle, which was shown at Rasht 29, incorporates the decorative grille motif that recurs in the artists work. Playfully juxtaposed with elements from pop culture, the grille alludes to the traditional design of a saqqakhaneh, the sacred commemorative water fountains from which the artistic community took its name.
Wall text from the exhibition
Faramarz Pilaram (Iranian, 1937-1982) Untitled (Composition 8) (installation view) c. 1960-1965 Ink, metallic paint and acrylic on paper Mohammed Afkhami Collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 4th October, 2019 – 19th January, 2020 Visited October 2019 posted January 2020
Curator: Florence Ostende
Installation view of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery, London Photo: Marcus Bunyan
I saw this exhibition in London in October, my last on my European research trip.
Having been a clubber since 1975, I was fascinated to see the history of cabarets and clubs in modern art. I remember going to gay clubs such as Scandals in Soho in the 1970s with their Saturday Night Fever lit up glass dance floor – except this one had a revolving glass turntable at its centre; or Adams under the the Leicester Square Odeon (I think it was the Odeon?) with walls padded and buttoned in red velvet, where they played the latest funk and international disco. Sylvester was the first out and out gay disco star, still beloved, who was taken from us by AIDS. And then there was Heaven, at the time of its opening in December 1979 the biggest gay club in Europe, housed in the arches beneath Charing Cross railway station – the site of many a debauched evening of gay disco, then hi-energy, and sex. We could dance for hours on that huge dance floor, under the lasers and neons, only leaving to get water at the bar, just dancing on pure energy, and then cruise the famous tunnels and bars of the club. Fabulous.
Whatever the case, looking at the exhibition as a whole, this was a fascinating insight into cabaret and club art, architecture and design with gems such as Jeanne Mammen’s glorious watercolour paintings on queer female desire and Lohse-Watchler’s dark scenes of Hamburg nightlife.
The complex breadth of bohemian and artistic culture covered in the exhibition was truly breathtaking.
Catalogue cover for Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery, London
Vienna: Cabaret Fledermaus 1907-1913 wall text Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Josef Hoffmann (Austrian, 1870-1956) Weiner Werkstätte Postkarte (left to right) (installation views) No. 74 (Interior view of the bar at the Cabaret Fledermaus); No. 75 (Interior view of the bar at the Cabaret Fledermaus); No. 67 (Interior view of the auditorium with stage at the Cabaret Fledermaus) 1907 Lithograph postcards Collection of Leonard A. Lauder Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Wall text about the Weiner Werkstätte postcards Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Josef Hoffmann (Austrian, 1870-1956) Wiener Werkstätte Postkarte No. 74 (Interior view of the bar at the Cabaret Fledermaus) 1907 Collection of Leonard A. Lauder
Carl Otto Czeschka (Austrian, 1878-1960) (design) with illustrations by various artists First programme for the Cabaret Fledermaus (installation view) 1907 Printed book Publisher: Wiener Werkstate, Vienna Printer: August Chwala, Vienna Theatermuseum, Vienna Photo: Marcus Bunyan
This programme for the opening night at the Cabaret Fledermaus on 19 October 1907 showcases its variety of experimental performances. Carl Otto Czeschka conceived the overarching design for the booklet, while vivid interior illustrations by contributing artists summon the spirit of the evenings activities.
Carl Otto Czeschka (design)(Austrian, 1878-1960) with illustrations by various artists First programme for the Cabaret Fledermaus (installation views) 1907 Printed book Publisher: Wiener Werkstate, Vienna Printer: August Chwala, Vienna Theatermuseum, Vienna Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Fritz Zeymer’s lyrical drawings capture the movements of Gertrude Barrison, who along with her sisters had become known in Europe and America for her bold, expressive dancing style. At the opening of the cabaret, Barrison performed solo to Edvard Greig’s romantic ‘Morgenstimmung’ (1875) in the ethereal white costume design by Zeymer himself (design shown here).
Carl Otto Czeschka (Austrian, 1878-1960) (design) with cover design and illustrations by Moriz Jung Second programme for the Cabaret Fledermaus (installation view) 1907 Printed book Publisher: Wiener Werkstate, Vienna Printer: August Chwala, Vienna Ariel Muzicant Collection, Vienna Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Le Corbusier (Swiss-French, 1887-1965) Plan at 1:100 for the Cabaret Fledermaus (installation views) 1907 Graphite pencil, ink and wash on paper Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Artefacts in display cabinet include Josef Hoffmann plant pot (1907), pepper mill (1907), vases for the Cabaret Fledermaus (1907) and an ashtray (1907) (installation views) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Bertold Löffler (Austrian, 1874-1960) Poster for the Cabaret Fledermaus (installation view) 1907 Lithograph The Albertina Museum, Vienna Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Bertold Löffler (Austrian, 1874-1960) Poster for a performance by Miss Macara at the Cabaret Fledermaus (installation view) 1909 Lithograph The Albertina Museum, Vienna Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Wall text about the poster for a performance by Miss Macara Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Fritz Lang (Austrian-German-American, 1890-1976) Poster for the Cabaret Fledermaus (installation view) 1911 Lithograph The Albertina Museum, Vienna Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Jane Alison, Head of Visual Arts, Barbican, said: “Into the Night casts a spotlight on some of the most electrifying cabarets and clubs of the modern era. Whether a creative haven, intoxicating stage or liberal hangout, all were magnets for artists, designers and performers to come together, collaborate and express themselves freely. Capturing the essence of these global incubators of experimentation and cross-disciplinarity, immersive 1:1 scale interiors will take the visitor on a captivating journey of discovery.”
Into the Night begins in Paris, on the eve of the 20th century, with two thrilling and iconic locations of the avant-garde. The theatrical shadow plays of the Chat Noir in the 1880s are brought to life through original silhouettes and works that decorated the interior of the cabaret, which acted as a forum for satire and debate for figures such as founder Rodolphe Salis, artist Henri Rivière and composer Erik Satie. The captivating serpentine dances of Loïe Fuller staged at the Folies Bergère in the 1890s were trail-blazing experiments in costume, light and movement. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec captured her performances in his extraordinary series of delicately hand-coloured lithographs, brought together for the exhibition. Visitors will encounter the immersive “Gesamtkunstwerk” (total work of art) design of the Cabaret Fledermaus (1907) in Vienna by the Wiener Werkstätte, where experimental cabaret productions were staged. The exhibition includes original documentation of Oskar Kokoschka’s exuberant puppet theatre and Gertrude Barrison’s expressionist dance.
The Cave of the Golden Calf (1912), an underground haunt in Soho epitomising decadence and hedonism, is evoked through designs for the interior by British artists Spencer Gore and Eric Gill, as well as Wyndham Lewis’s highly stylised programmes for the eclectic performance evenings – advertised at the time as encompassing “the picturesque dances of the South, its fervid melodies, Parisian wit, English humour.” In Zurich, the radical atmosphere of the Cabaret Voltaire (1916) is manifested through absurdist sound poetry and fantastical masks that deconstruct body and language, evoking the anarchic performances by Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings and Marcel Janco. This is the birthplace of Dada, where humour, chaos and ridicule reign. Two significant clubs in Rome provide insights into the electrifying dynamism of Futurism in Italy in the 1920s. Giacomo Balla’s mesmerising Bal Tic Tac (1921) is summoned by colour-saturated designs for the club’s interior, capturing the swirling movement of dancers. Also on show are drawings and furnishings for Fortunato Depero’s spectacular inferno-inspired Cabaret del Diavolo (1922) which occupied three floors representing heaven, purgatory and hell. Depero’s flamboyant tapestry writhes with dancing demons, expressing the club’s motto “Tutti all’inferno!!! (Everyone to hell!!!)”.
After a period of restraint in Germany during the First World War, the 1920s heralded an era of liberation and the relaxation of censorship laws. Numerous clubs and bars in metropolitan cities, such as Berlin, playing host to heady cabaret revues and daring striptease; the notorious synchronised Tiller Girls are captured in Karl Hofer’s iconic portrait. Major works by often overlooked female artists such as Jeanne Mammen and Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, as well as George Grosz, Otto Dix and Max Beckmann, capture the pulsating energy of these nightclubs and the alternative lifestyles that flourished within them during the 1920s and 1930s. During the same time in New York, the literary and jazz scenes thrived and co-mingled in the predominantly African American neighbourhood of Harlem, where black identity was re-forged and debated. Paintings and prints by Aaron Douglas and Jacob Lawrence convey the vibrant atmosphere and complex racial and sexual politics of the time, while poetry by Langston Hughes and early cinema featuring Duke Ellington shed light on the rich range of creative expression thriving within the city.
Into the Night also celebrates the lesser known but highly influential Mbari Artists and Writers Club, founded in the early 1960s in Nigeria. Focusing on two of the club’s key locations, in Ibadan and Osogbo, the exhibition explores how they were founded as laboratories for postcolonial artistic practices, providing a platform for a dazzling range of activities – including open-air dance and theatre performances, featuring ground breaking Yoruba operas by Duro Ladipo and Fela Kuti’s Afro-jazz; poetry and literature readings; experimental art workshops; and pioneering exhibitions by African and international artists such as Colette Omogbai, Ibrahim El-Salahi and Uche Okeke. Meanwhile in Tehran, Rasht 29 emerged in1966 as a creative space for avant-garde painters, poets, musicians and filmmakers to freely discuss their practice. Spontaneous performances were celebrated and works by artists like Parviz Tanavoli and Faramarz Pilaram hung in the lounge while a soundtrack including Led Zeppelin and the Beatles played constantly.
The exhibition is curated and organised by Barbican Centre, London, in collaboration with the Belvedere, Vienna.
Press release from the Barbican Art Gallery [Online] Cited 28/12/2019
Rome: Cabaret Del Diavolo 1922 wall text Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery showing Fortunato Depero’s tapestry Diavoletti neri e bianchi. Danza di diavoli (Black and White Little Devils: Dance of the Devils), 1922 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Rome: Bal Tic Tac 1921 wall text Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Giacomo Balla (Italian, 1871-1958) Design for the sign and flashing light for the facade of the Bal Tic Tac (installation views) 1921 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Giacomo Balla (Italian, 1871-1958) Dancer from the Bal Tic Tac (installation views) 1921 Pencil on paper Biagiotti Cigna Foundation Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Giacomo Balla (Italian, 1871-1958) Design for a light for the Bal Tic Tac (installation view) 1921 Pencil and tempera on paper Torino, GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte moderna e Contemporanea, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Giacomo Balla wall text Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Mexico City: Cafe De Nadie & Carpa Amaro 1920s wall text Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery showing a group of Mexican woodcuts 1922-1928 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Justino Fernandez (Mexican, 1904-1972) El corrido (The Corrido) (installation views) 1928 Woodcut Fondo Diaz de León Colección Andres Blastien, Mexico Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Justino Fernandez (Mexican, 1904-1972) La hora del mando (Market Time) (installation views) 1928 Woodcut Fondo Diaz de León Colección Andres Blastien, Mexico Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Fernando Leal (Mexican, 1896-1964) Danzantes (Dancers) (installation view) 1922 Woodcut Fondo Diaz de León Colección Andres Blastien, Mexico Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Francisco Diaz de León (Mexican, 1897-1975) Retablo (Altarpiece) 1928 Woodcut Fondo Diaz de León Colección Andres Blastien, Mexico Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Isabella Villaseñor (Mexican, 1909-1953) Autorretrato (Self-portrait) (installation view) 1928 Woodcut Colecciones Carlos Monsivais Museo del Estanquillo Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Fernando Leal (Mexican, 1896-1964) Dance of the Crescent Moon (installation view) 1922 Woodcut Museo Nacional de Arte, INBA Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Gabriel Fernández Ledesma (Mexican, 1900-1983) Cabeza de Lenin (Head of Lenin) (installation view) 1927 Woodcut Fondo Diaz de León Colección Andres Blastien, Mexico Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Gabriel Fernández Ledesma (Mexican, 1900-1983) Tlacuache (Opposum) (installation view) c. 1920s Woodcut Fondo Diaz de León Colección Andres Blastien, Mexico Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Gabriel Fernández Ledesma (Mexican, 1900-1983) Patos Chinos (Chinese Ducks) (installation view) 1928 Woodcut Fondo Diaz de León Colección Andres Blastien, Mexico Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery showing Germán Cueto’s Máscara estridentista (Stridentist Masks), c. 1924 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Barbican Art Gallery showing Mexican printed books 1923-1927 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Ramón Alva de la Canal (Mexican, 1892-1985) El movimiento estridentista (The Stridentist Movement) (installation views) 1926 Woodcut Francisco Reyes Palma Collection Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Butchers, lion tamers, and Lustmord (sexualised murder) makers. War, rape, prostitution, violence, old age and death. Creativity, defeat, disfigurement, and revelry. Suicide and misery, poverty and widowhood, beauty and song. Magic in realism, realism and magic.
The interwar years are one of the most creative artistic periods in human history. But there is a magical dark undertone which emanates from the mind of this Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity:
“The art historian Dennis Crockett says there is no direct English translation, and breaks down the meaning in the original German:
Sachlichkeit should be understood by its root, Sache, meaning “thing”, “fact”, “subject”, or “object.” Sachlich could be best understood as “factual”, “matter-of-fact”, “impartial”, “practical”, or “precise”; Sachlichkeit is the noun form of the adjective/adverb and usually implies “matter-of-factness” …
The New Objectivity was composed of two tendencies which Hartlaub characterised in terms of a left and right wing: on the left were the verists, who “tear the objective form of the world of contemporary facts and represent current experience in its tempo and fevered temperature;” and on the right the classicists, who “search more for the object of timeless ability to embody the external laws of existence in the artistic sphere.”
The verists’ vehement form of realism emphasised the ugly and sordid. Their art was raw, provocative, and harshly satirical. George Grosz and Otto Dix are considered the most important of the verists. The verists developed Dada’s abandonment of any pictorial rules or artistic language into a “satirical hyperrealism”, as termed by Raoul Hausmann, and of which the best known examples are the graphical works and photo-montages of John Heartfield. Use of collage in these works became a compositional principle to blend reality and art, as if to suggest that to record the facts of reality was to go beyond the most simple appearances of things. This later developed into portraits and scenes by artists such as Grosz, Dix, and Rudolf Schlichter. Portraits would give emphasis to particular features or objects that were seen as distinctive aspects of the person depicted. Satirical scenes often depicted a madness behind what was happening, depicting the participants as cartoon-like.
Other verists, like Christian Schad, depicted reality with a clinical precision, which suggested both an empirical detachment and intimate knowledge of the subject. Schad’s paintings are characterised by “an artistic perception so sharp that it seems to cut beneath the skin”, according to the art critic Wieland Schmied. Often, psychological elements were introduced in his work, which suggested an underlying unconscious reality.
Compared to the verists, the classicists more clearly exemplify the “return to order” that arose in the arts throughout Europe. The classicists included Georg Schrimpf, Alexander Kanoldt, Carlo Mense, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, and Wilhelm Heise. The sources of their inspiration included 19th-century art, the Italian metaphysical painters, the artists of Novecento Italiano, and Henri Rousseau.
The classicists are best understood by Franz Roh’s term Magic Realism, though Roh originally intended “magical realism” to be synonymous with the Neue Sachlichkeit as a whole. For Roh, as a reaction to expressionism, the idea was to declare “[that] the autonomy of the objective world around us was once more to be enjoyed; the wonder of matter that could crystallise into objects was to be seen anew.” With the term, he was emphasising the “magic” of the normal world as it presents itself to us – how, when we really look at everyday objects, they can appear strange and fantastic.” (Text from the Wikipedia website)
It strikes me, with a slap of the hand across the face, that the one, realism, cannot live cannot breathe with/out the other, the Other, magic. One cannot coexist without the other, as in the body not living without oxygen to breathe: one occupies the other whilst itself being inhabited. The precondition to reality is in essence the unknown. As order relies on mutation to define itself, so reality calls forth that form of hyperrealism, a state of magic, that we can have knowledge of (the image of ourselves before birth, that last image, can we remember, before death) but cannot mediate.
Magic/realism is no duality but a fluid, observational, hybridity which exists on multiple planes of reality – from the downright mad and evil to the ecstatic and revelatory. The fiction of a stable reality is twisted; magic or the supernatural is supposedly presented in an otherwise real-world or mundane setting. Or is it the other way round? Or no way round at all?
It is the role of the artist to set up opposites, throwing one against the other, to throw… into the void.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Tate Modern for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time.”
Otto Dix
Tate Modern will explore German art from between the wars in a year-long, free exhibition, drawing upon the rich holdings of The George Economou Collection.
These loans offer a rare opportunity to view a range of artworks not ordinarily on public display, and to see a small selection of key Tate works returned to the context in which they were originally created and exhibited nearly one hundred years ago.
This presentation explores the diverse practices of a number of different artists, including Otto Dix, George Grosz, Albert Birkle and Jeanne Mammen. Although the term ‘magic realism’ is today commonly associated with the literature of Latin America, it was inherited from the artist and critic Franz Roh who invented it in 1925 to describe a shift from the art of the expressionist era, towards cold veracity and unsettling imagery. In the context of growing political extremism, the new realism reflected a fluid social experience as well as inner worlds of emotion and magic.
When the First World War erupted, Dix enthusiastically volunteered for the German Army. He was assigned to a field artillery regiment in Dresden. In the autumn of 1915 he was assigned as a non-commissioned officer of a machine-gun unit on the Western front and took part in the Battle of the Somme. In November 1917, his unit was transferred to the Eastern front until the end of hostilities with Russia, and in February 1918 he was stationed in Flanders. Back on the western front, he fought in the German Spring Offensive. He earned the Iron Cross (second class) and reached the rank of vizefeldwebel. In August of that year he was wounded in the neck, and shortly after he took pilot training lessons.
He took part in a Fliegerabwehr-Kurs (“Defense Pilot Course”) in Tongern, was promoted to Vizefeldwebel and after passing the medical tests transferred to Aviation Replacement Unit Schneidemühl in Posen. He was discharged from service in 22 December 1918 and was home for Christmas.
Dix was profoundly affected by the sights of the war, and later described a recurring nightmare in which he crawled through destroyed houses. He represented his traumatic experiences in many subsequent works, including a portfolio of fifty etchings called Der Krieg, published in 1924. Subsequently, he referred again to the war in The War Triptych, painted from 1929-1932.
Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969) International Riding Act (Internationaler Reitakt) 1922 Etching, drypoint on paper 496 x 431 mm The George Economou Collection On short term loan
Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969) International Riding Scene (Internationale Reiterszene) 1922 Watercolour, pen and ink on paper 510 × 410 mm The George Economou Collection On short term loan
Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969) Butcher Shop (Fleischerladen) 1920 Etching, drypoint on paper 495 x 338 mm The George Economou Collection On short term loan
Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969) Lion-Tamer (Dompteuse) 1922 Etching, drypoint on paper 496 x 429 mm The George Economou Collection On short term loan
Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969) Lust Murder (Lustmord) 1922 Watercolour, ink and graphite on paper 485 x 365 mm The George Economou Collection On short term loan
At the end of 1918 Dix returned to Gera, but the next year he moved to Dresden, where he studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste. He became a founder of the Dresden Secession group in 1919, during a period when his work was passing through an expressionist phase. In 1920, he met George Grosz and, influenced by Dada, began incorporating collage elements into his works, some of which he exhibited in the first Dada Fair in Berlin. He also participated in the German Expressionists exhibition in Darmstadt that year.
In 1924, he joined the Berlin Secession; by this time he was developing an increasingly realistic style of painting that used thin glazes of oil paint over a tempera underpainting, in the manner of the old masters. His 1923 painting The Trench, which depicted dismembered and decomposed bodies of soldiers after a battle, caused such a furore that the Wallraf-Richartz Museum hid the painting behind a curtain. In 1925 the then-mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, cancelled the purchase of the painting and forced the director of the museum to resign.
Dix was a contributor to the Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition in Mannheim in 1925, which featured works by George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, Karl Hubbuch, Rudolf Schlichter, Georg Scholz and many others. Dix’s work, like that of Grosz – his friend and fellow veteran – was extremely critical of contemporary German society and often dwelled on the act of Lustmord, or sexualised murder. He drew attention to the bleaker side of life, unsparingly depicting prostitution, violence, old age and death.
In one of his few statements, published in 1927, Dix declared, “The object is primary and the form is shaped by the object.”
Among his most famous paintings are Sailor and Girl (1925), used as the cover of Philip Roth’s 1995 novel Sabbath’s Theater, the triptych Metropolis (1928), a scornful portrayal of depraved actions of Germany’s Weimar Republic, where nonstop revelry was a way to deal with the wartime defeat and financial catastrophe, and the startling Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926). His depictions of legless and disfigured veterans – a common sight on Berlin’s streets in the 1920s – unveil the ugly side of war and illustrate their forgotten status within contemporary German society, a concept also developed in Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.
Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969) Technical Personnel (Technisches Personal) 1922 Etching, drypoint on paper 497 x 426 mm The George Economou Collection On short term loan
Magic Realism
The term magic realism was invented by German photographer, art historian and art critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe modern realist paintings with fantasy or dream-like subjects.
The term was used by Franz Roh in his book Nach Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus (After Expressionism: Magic Realism).
In Central Europe magic realism was part of the reaction against modern or avant-garde art, known as the return to order, that took place generally after the First World War. Magic realist artists included Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Savinio and others in Italy, and Alexander Kanoldt and Adolf Ziegler in Germany. Magic realism is closely related to the dreamlike depictions of surrealism and neo-romanticism in France. The term is also used of certain American painters in the 1940s and 1950s including Paul Cadmus, Philip Evergood and Ivan Albright.
In 1955 the critic Angel Flores used the term magic realism to describe the writing of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez, and it has since become a significant if disputed literary term.
Text from the Tate website [Online] Cited 23/06/2019
George Grosz (German, 1893-1959) Suicide (Selbstmörder) 1916 Oil paint on canvas 1000 x 775 mm Tate Purchased with assistance from the Art Fund 1976
The horrific picture ofSuicide by Groz astonishes by its savage imagery, harsh colours and restless composition. Highlighting the misery of the middle class who has no means to live on today and no future tomorrow, the artist gets one man strung up on a lamp post and the other shot on a stage just near a prompter guy in his cabin. Is his death a real thing or is it a part of some performance? It seems to be quite real because everybody promptly abandons the scene except for the hungry dogs roaming the desolate streets of Berlin. And these murders are no worse than dubious pleasures given by an ugly, man-like prostitute to an aged bald client visiting her in a cheap apartment block – the only source of solace from the cold and desolation for the bourgeois at the time. The pervasive moral corruption in Berlin during the war years is underlined by the forsaken Kirche at the back.
Text from the Arthive website [Online] Cited 23/06/2019
Grosz was drafted into the German army in 1914, after the outbreak of the First World War. His experiences in the trenches deepened his intense loathing for German society. Discharged from the army for medical reasons, he produced savagely satirical paintings and drawings that ‘expressed my despair, hate and disillusionment’. This work shows dogs roaming past the abandoned bodies of suicides in red nocturnal streets. The inclusion of an aged client visiting a prostitute reflects the pervasive moral corruption in Berlin during the war years.
Gallery label, September 2004
Rudolf Schlichter (German, 1890-1955) The Artist with Two Hanged Women (Der Künstler mit zwei erhängten Frauen) 1924 Watercolour and graphite on paper 453 x 340 mm The George Economou Collection On short term loan
Sexualised murder was a recurrent theme within this period: the exhibition holding a number of other works similar to the piece by Dix. An example is Rudolf Schlichter’s The Artist with Two Hanged Women watercolour. Schlichter was known to have sexual fantasies revolved around hanging, as well as an obsession with women’s buttoned boots. Acting as a self-portrait, the image represents Schlichter’s private fantasies, whilst also drawing upon the public issues of suicide, which saw an unsettling rise during this period.
Text by Georgia Massie-Taylor from the G’s Spots blog
Albert Birkle (German, 1900-1986) Crucifixion (Kreuzigung) 1921 Oil paint on board 920 x 607 mm The George Economou Collection On short term loan
Herbert Gurschner (Austrian, 1901-1975) Lazarus (The Workers) (Lazarus (Die Arbeiter)) 1928 Oil paint on canvas 920 x 690 mm The George Economou Collection On short term loan
Herbert Gurschner (Austrian, 1901-1975)
Herbert Gurschner was born on August 27, 1901 in Innsbruck. In 1917 he attended the art school in Innsbruck and had his first exhibition. Between 1918 and 1920 he studied at the Munich Art Academy. After that he had other exhibitions in Innsbruck.
In 1924 he married an English nobleman, through which he came to London artist and collector circles. In 1929 he had his first exhibition in the London Fine Art Society. Two years later, he showed another exhibition in the Fine Art Society and made the artistic breakthrough in England. Subsequently, he was able to open several exhibitions throughout the UK. Herbert Gurschner found access to aristocratic, diplomatic and business circles and was able to exhibit his works in New York City, among others .
At the time of World War II Gurschner obtained British citizenship and served in the British army. During this time, he met his future second wife, the actress Brenda Davidoff, with whom he lived in London. In the postwar years Gurschner exhibited only sporadically and instead focuses on the stage design (including for the Royal Opera House, Globe Theater and Hammersmith Apollo). On January 10, 1975 Gurschner died in London.
Herbert Gurschner (Austrian, 1901-1975) The Annunciation 1929-30 Oil on canvas 1617 x 1911 mm Tate Presented by Lord Duveen 1931
This summer, Tate Modern will explore the art of the Weimar Republic (1919-33) in a year-long, free display, drawing upon the rich holdings of The George Economou Collection. This presentation of around seventy paintings and works on paper will address the complex paradoxes of the Weimar era, in which liberalisation and anti-militarism flourished in tandem with political and economic uncertainty. These loans offer a rare opportunity to view a range of artworks not ordinarily on public display – some of which have never been seen in the United Kingdom before – and to see a selection of key Tate works returned to the context in which they were originally created and exhibited nearly one hundred years ago.
Although the term ‘magic realism’ is today commonly associated with the literature of Latin America, it was inherited from the artist and critic Franz Roh who invented it in 1925 to describe a shift from the anxious and emotional art of the expressionist era, towards the cold veracity and unsettling imagery of this inter-war period. In the context of growing political extremism, this new realism reflected a more liberal society as well as inner worlds of emotion and magic.
The profound social and political disarray after the First World War and the collapse of the Empire largely brought about this stylistic shift. Berlin in particular attracted a reputation for moral depravity and decadence in the context of the economic collapse. The reconfiguration of urban life was an important aspect of the Weimar moment. Alongside exploring how artists responded to social spaces and the studio, entertainment sites like the cabaret and the circus will be highlighted, including a display of Otto Dix’s enigmatic Zirkus (‘Circus’) print portfolio. Artists recognised the power in representing these realms of public fantasy and places where outsiders were welcomed.
Works by Otto Dix, George Grosz and Max Beckmann perhaps best known today for their unsettling depictions of Weimar life, will be presented alongside the works of under recognised artists such as Albert Birkle, Jeanne Mammen and Rudolf Schlichter, and many others whose careers were curtailed by the end of the Weimar period due to the rise of Nationalist Socialism and its agenda to promote art that celebrated its political ideologies.
The display comes at a pertinent time, in a year of commemoration of the anniversary of the end of the First World War, alongside Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One at Tate Britain and William Kentridge’s new performance for 14-18 Now at Tate Modern entitled The Head and the Load, running from 11-15 July 2018.
Magic Realism is curated by Matthew Gale, Head of Displays and Katy Wan, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern. The display is realised with thanks to loans from The George Economou Collection, with additional support from the Huo Family Foundation (UK) Limited.
Press release from the Tate website [Online] Cited 23/06/2019
Jeanne Mammen (German, 1890-1976) Boring Dolls (Langweilige Puppen) 1929 Watercolour and graphite on paper mounted on cardboard 384 x 286 mm The George Economou Collection On short term loan
Jeanne Mammen (German, 1890-1976) Free room (Brüderstrasse (Zimmer frei)) 1930 Watercolour, ink and graphite on vellum The George Economou Collection On short term loan
Jeanne Mammen (21 November 1890 – 22 April 1976) was a German painter and illustrator of the Weimar period. Her work is associated with the New Objectivity and Symbolism movements. She is best known for her depictions of strong, sensual women and Berlin city life.
… In 1921, Mammen moved into an apartment with her sister in Berlin. This apartment was a former photographer’s studio which she lived in until her death. Aside from Art throughout her life Mammen also was interested in science. She was close friends with Max Delbrück who left Europe and took some of her artwork with him and exhibited them in California. In addition to bringing these art works to be exhibited he also sent Mammen care packages from the United States with art supplies.
In 1930 she had a major exhibition in the Fritz Gurlitt gallery. Over the next two years, at Gurlitt’s suggestion, she created one of her most important works: a series of eight lithographs illustrating Les Chansons de Bilitis, a collection of lesbian love poems by Pierre Louÿs.
In 1933, following her inclusion in an exhibition of female artists in Berlin, the Nazi authorities denounced her motifs and subjects as “Jewish”, and banned her lithographs for Les Chansons de Bilitis. The Nazis were also opposed to her blatant disregard for apparent ‘appropriate’ female submissiveness in her expressions of her subjects. Much of her work also includes imagery of lesbians. The Nazis shut down most of the journals she had worked for, and she refused to work for those that complied with their cultural policies. Until the end of the war she practiced a kind of “inner emigration”. She stopped exhibiting her work and focused on advertising. For a time she also peddled second-hand books from a handcart.
Otto Rudolf Schatz (Austrian, 1900-1961) Moon Women (Mondfrauen) 1930 Oil paint on canvas 1915 x 1110 mm The George Economou Collection On short term loan
Otto Rudolf Schatz (Austrian, 1900-1961)
Otto Rudolf Schatz was born on January 18, 1900, the son of a post office family in Vienna. From 1915 to 1918 Schatz studied at the Viennese Art Academy under Oskar Strnad and Anton von Kenner. In 1918 his studies were interrupted by military service in the Second World War although he graduated in 1919. During this time the artist’s chosen medium was wood. From 1920 he worked with the painter Max Hevesi who exhibited Schatz’s paintings and woodcuts. Otto Rudolf Schatz also published books with the art critic Arthur Roessler including The Gothic Mood.
In 1923 Schatz became friends with the Viennese gallery owner Otto Kallir who became one of his most important patrons. Kallir continuously presented Schatz’s works in the Neue Galerie. In the same year the Austrian collector Fritz Karpfen published Austrian Art featuring Schatz’s art. The artist’s book of twelve woodcuts was published with a foreword by the art historian Erica Tietze-Conrat. The painter also traveled to Venice in 1923.
In 1924 he had his first collective exhibition in the Neue Galerie. In 1925 Schatz exhibited in the Neue Galerie together with Anton Faistauer, Franz Probst, and Marianne Seeland. In the same year he became a member of the Austrian artists’ association Kunstschau and he provided eight original woodcuts for the publication of a fairytale book Im Satansbruch by Ernst Preczang.
In 1927 Schatz contributed woodcuts to the volume The New Town by the Berlin Büchergilde Gutenberg. From 1928 to 1938 he was a valued member in the Hagenbund in Vienna. In 1929 he produced several illustrations for The Stromverlag among others and for Stefan Zweig’s Fantastic Night and H. G. Wells The Invisible. In 1936 he participated in a collective exhibition with Georg Ehrlich in the Neue Galerie. In 1936 to 1937 Schatz traveled through the United States as well as visited the World Exhibition in Paris. His paintings were seen in exhibition of his New York, in the Neue Galerie, and in the Hagenbund. The artists provided illustrations for the Büchergilde Gutenberg edition of Upton Sinclair’s Co-op.
When the National Socialists gained power in 1938 Schatz was forbidden to work. In 1938 he lived with his Jewish wife Valerie Wittal in Brno and in 1944 in Prague where he painted landscape miniatures. In 1944 Schatz was imprisoned in the Klettendorf labour camp and then transferred to the Graditz and Bistritz concentration camps. In 1946 Schatz returned to Vienna where he was promoted by the cultural politician, city counsellor, and writer Viktor Matejka. In 1946 he became a member of the Vienna Secession. In 1947 Schatz received the prize of the city of Vienna for graphics. In the same year eighteen woodcuts were created for Peter Rosegger’s Jakob der Letzte. In 1949 Scatz’s watercolour series Das war der Prater was published in book form. In 1951 Schatz won the competition for the design of the Vienna Westbahnhof. On April 26, 1961 Otto Rudolf Schatz died of lung cancer in Vienna.
As a graphic artist and painter Otto Rudolf Schatz occupies a leading position in the Austrian inter-war period. His multi-faceted work which moves between Expressionism and New Objectivity, was characterised by a social-critical attitude that gives his work historical significance. The artist’s works are now found in numerous collections including the Belvedere in Vienna, the Vienna Museum, and the Hans Schmid Private Foundation.
Anonymous text. “Biography,” on the Otto Rudolf Schatz website Nd [Online] Cited 23/06/2019
Rudolf Schlichter (German, 1890-1955) Lady with Red Scarf (Speedy with the Moon) (Frauenportrait (Speedy)) 1933 The George Economou Collection On short term loan
Rudolf Schlichter (German, 1890-1955)
Rudolf Schlichter (or Rudolph Schlichter) (December 6, 1890 – May 3, 1955) was a German artist and one of the most important representatives of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement.
Schlichter was born in Calw, Württemberg. After an apprenticeship as an enamel painter at a Pforzheim factory he attended the School of Arts and Crafts in Stuttgart. He subsequently studied under Hans Thoma and Wilhelm Trübner at the Academy in Karlsruhe. Called for military service in World War I, he carried out a hunger strike to secure early release, and in 1919 he moved to Berlin where he joined the Communist Party of Germany and the “November” group. He took part in a Dada fair in 1920 and also worked as an illustrator for several periodicals.
A major work from this period is his Dada Roof Studio, a watercolour showing an assortment of figures on an urban rooftop. Around a table sit a woman and two men in top hats. One of the men has a prosthetic hand and the other, also missing a hand, appears on closer scrutiny to be mannequin. Two other figures in gas masks may also be mannequins. A child holds a pail and a woman wearing high button shoes (for which Schlichter displayed a marked fetish) stands on a pedestal, gesturing inexplicably.
In 1925 Schlichter participated in the “Neue Sachlichkeit” exhibit at the Mannheim Kunsthalle. His work from this period is realistic, a good example being the Portrait of Margot (1924) now in the Berlin Märkisches Museum. It depicts a prostitute who often modelled for Schlichter, standing on a deserted street and holding a cigarette.
When Adolf Hitler took power, bringing to an end the Weimar period, his activities were greatly curtailed. In 1935 he returned to Stuttgart, and four years later to Munich. In 1937 his works were seized as degenerate art, and in 1939 the Nazi authorities banned him from exhibiting. His studio was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1942.
At the war’s end, Schlichter resumed exhibiting works. His works from this period were surrealistic in character. He died in Munich in 1955.
Sergius Pauser, who was born in Vienna on 28 December 1896, represents the prototype of this generation of artists. As a painter, he enjoyed the recognition of his contemporaries and as a much sought-after artist who was able to earn his living with his paintings. He was never a revolutionary but rather a “gentleman of the Viennese order”, who sought to capture moods and atmosphere in his paintings. The writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) wrote of Pauser: “Sergius Pauser uttered thoughts about people – Adalbert Stifter, for example – that I have never heard before or since; he succeeded in revealing the most concealed corners of poetic sensitivity; he was a tender and vigilant diviner on the landscape of world literature, a philosopher and an artist through and through.” And yet a painter like Sergius Pauser is barely known today; only a few of his works hang in Austrian galleries and many of his paintings cannot be traced due to the emigration of their owners.
Hans Grundig (February 19, 1901 – September 11, 1958) was a German painter and graphic artist associated with the New Objectivity movement.
He was born in Dresden and, after an apprenticeship as an interior decorator, studied in 1920–1921 at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts. He then studied at the Dresden Academy from 1922 to 1923. During the 1920s his paintings, primarily portraits of working-class subjects, were influenced by the work of Otto Dix. Like his friend Gert Heinrich Wollheim, he often depicted himself in a theatrical manner, as in his Self-Portrait during the Carnival Season (1930).
He had his first solo exhibition in 1930 at the Dresden gallery of Józef Sandel. He made his first etchings in 1933.
Politically anti-fascist, he joined the German Communist Party in 1926, and was a founding member of the arts organisation Assoziation revolutionärer bildender Künstler in Dresden in 1929.
Following the fall of the Weimar Republic, Grundig was declared a degenerate artist by the Nazis, who included his works in the defamatory Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich in 1937. He expressed his antagonism toward the regime in paintings such as The Thousand Year Reich (1936). Forbidden to practice his profession, he was arrested twice – briefly in 1936, and again in 1938, after which he was interned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp from 1940 to 1944.
In 1945 he went to Moscow, where he attended an anti-fascist school. Returning to Berlin in 1946, he became a professor of painting at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. In 1957 he published his autobiography, Zwischen Karneval und Aschermittwoch (“Between Shrovetide carnival and Ash Wednesday”). He was awarded the Heinrich Mann Prize in Berlin in 1958, the year of his death.
Conrad Felixmüller (21 May 1897 – 24 March 1977) was a German expressionist painter and printmaker. Born in Dresden as Conrad Felix Müller, he chose Felixmüller as his nom d’artiste.
He attended drawing classes at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts in 1911-1912 before studying under Carl Bantzer at the Dresden Academy of Art. In 1917 he performed military service as a medical orderly, and became a founding member of the Dresden Expressionist group Expressionistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Dresden. He achieved his earliest success as a printmaker. Felixmüller was a member of the Communist Party of Germany from 1918 to 1922. He published many woodcuts and drawings in left-wing magazines, and remained a prolific printmaker throughout his career. He was a close friend of the composer Clemens Braun of whom he produced a number of portraits and a woodcut depicting him on his deathbed.
He was one of the youngest members of the New Objectivity movement. His paintings often deal with the social realities of Germany’s Weimar Republic. He was mentor to the German Expressionist Otto Dix.
Felixmüller’s work became more objective and restrained after the mid-1920s. He wrote in 1929:
“It has become increasingly clear to me that the only necessary goal is to depict the direct, simple life which one has lived oneself, also involving the design of colour as painting – in the manner in which it was cultivated by the Old Masters for centuries, until Impressionism and Expressionism, infected by the technical and industrial delusions of grandeur, rejected every affinity for tradition, ability and results, committing harakiri.”
In the 1930s, many of his works were seized as degenerate art by the Nazis, and destroyed. In 1944, his studio in Berlin was bombed, resulting in more losses of his works. From 1949 to 1962 Felixmüller taught at the University of Halle. He died in the Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf.
Heinrich Maria Davringhausen (German, 1894-1970) The Poet Däubler (Der Dichter Däubler) 1917 Oil paint on canvas 1810 x 1603 mm The George Economou Collection On short term loan
Heinrich Maria Davringhausen (German, 1894-1970)
Heinrich Maria Davringhausen (21 October 1894 – 13 December 1970) was a German painter associated with the New Objectivity.
Davringhausen was born in Aachen. Mostly self-taught as a painter, he began as a sculptor, studying briefly at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts before participating in a group exhibition at Alfred Flechtheim’s gallery in 1914. He also traveled to Ascona with his friend the painter Carlo Mense that year. At this early stage his paintings were influenced by the expressionists, especially August Macke.
Exempted from military service in World War I, he lived in Berlin from 1915 to 1918, forming friendships with George Grosz and John Heartfield. In 1919 he had a solo exhibition at Hans Goltz’ Galerie Neue Kunst in Munich, and exhibited in the first “Young Rhineland” exhibition in Düsseldorf. Davringhausen became a member of the “Novembergruppe” and gained some prominence among the artists representing a new tendency in German art of the postwar period. He was asked to take part in the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) exhibition in Mannheim which brought together many leading “post-expressionist” artists, including Grosz, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Alexander Kanoldt and Georg Schrimpf.
Davringhausen went into exile with the fall of the Weimar republic in 1933, first going to Majorca, then to France. In Germany approximately 200 of his works were removed from public museums by the Nazis on the grounds that they were degenerate art. Prohibited from exhibiting, Davringhausen was interned in Cagnes-sur-Mer but fled to Côte D’Azur. In 1945 however he returned to Cagnes-sur-Mer, a suburb of Nice, where he remained for the rest of his life. He worked as an abstract painter under the name Henri Davring until his death in Nice in 1970.
Perhaps the best-known work from Davringhausen’s New Objectivity period is Der Schieber (The Black-Marketeer), a Magic realist painting of 1920-1921, which is in the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf im Ehrenhof. Painted in acidulous colours, it depicts a glowering businessman seated at a desk in a modern office suite that foreshortens dramatically behind him. Although Davringhausen rarely presented social criticism in his work, in Der Schieber “the artist created the classic pictorial symbol of the period of inflation that was commencing”.
Much of Davringhausen’s work was deposited in 1989 in the Leopold Hoesch museum in Düren, which has subsequently organised several exhibitions of his pictures, above all those from the later period.
Albert Birkle was born in Charlottenburg, then an independent city and since 1920 part of Berlin. His grandfather on his mother’s side, Gustav Bregenzer, and his father, Carl Birkle, both were painters, originally from Swabia. Albert Birkle was trained as a decorative painter in his father’s firm. From 1918 to 1924, he studied at the Hochschule für die bildenden Künste / College of Fine Arts, a predecessor of today’s Universität der Künste Berlin. Birkle developed a unique style informed by expressionism and New Objectivity / Neue Sachlichkeit. His subjects were lonely, mystic landscapes, typical scenes of Berlin of the 20’s and 30’s, such as scenes from Tiergarten Park, bar scenes etc., character portraits, and religious scenes. In his style of portrait painting he was often compared to Otto Dix and George Grosz.
In 1927, Birkle had his first one man show in Berlin, which turned out to be very successful. He decided to turn down a professorship at the Koenigsberg Acadamy of Arts in order to continue to work independently as an artist and to dedicate himself to assignments in the field of church decoration, where he had become a specialist. As National Socialism was on its way to power, Birkle moved to Salzburg, Austria in 1932. Nevertheless, he represented Germany at the Venice Biennale as late as 1936. In 1937, his artwork was declared to be “entarted”, his works were removed from public collections, and a painting ban was imposed on him.
In 1946, Birkle received Austrian citizenship. In the post-war year, he made a living painting religious frescos for various churches and doing oil paintings. In his final year, he more and more returned back to his Berlin themes of the 20’s and 30’s.
Curator: Lauren Hinkson, Associate Curator of Collections at the Guggenheim Museum in New York
Organised by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York
Josef Albers (American born Germany, 1888-1976) Study for Homage to the Square, Closing 1964 Acrylic on Masonite Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, The Josef Albers Foundation, Inc., 1996
It is fascinating to see “the influence and connectivity between the work of Josef Albers and the abstracted geometric vocabulary of pre-Columbian art, architecture and material culture” … and the press release might add, between Albers, architecture and the flattened, geometric vocabulary of his photographs.
The lesser-known photographs and collages are “a visual conversation Albers created in response to his frequent visits to Mexico to view archaeological sites as early as the 1930s, illustrating the nuanced relationship between the geometry and design elements of pre-Columbian monuments and the artist’s iconic abstract canvases and works on paper.”
But these photographic collages stand as works of art in their own right, for they are music not just notation. Just look at the elegance and tension between the lower images in Mitla (1956, below). You don’t group photographs together like this so that they sing, so that the ‘ice-fire’ as Minor White would say (that space between each image that acts as tension between two or more images), enacts powerful attractors of light, form and energy (or spirit, if you like) … without knowing what you are doing, without feeling the presence of what you are photographing.
While artists have used photographs as “models” for other forms of art for years (for example Atget’s “documents for artists”), and we acknowledge that purpose, these images stand on their own two feet as visually nuanced, cerebral and finished works of art.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Heard Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Josef Albers (American born Germany, 1888-1976) Study for Sanctuary 1941-1942 Ink on paper The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, Connecticut, 1976
Josef Albers (American born Germany, 1888-1976) Ballcourt at Monte Alban, Mexico c. 1936-1937 Gelatin silver print The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, Connecticut, 1976
Josef Albers (American born Germany, 1888-1976) Tenayuca I 1942 Oil on Masonite The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, Connecticut, 1976
Josef Albers (American born Germany, 1888-1976) The Pyramid of the Magician, Uxmal 1950 Gelatin silver print Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, The Josef Albers Foundation, Inc., 1996
Josef Albers (American born Germany, 1888-1976) Governor’s Palace, Uxmal 1952 Gelatin silver print Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, The Josef Albers Foundation, Inc., 1996
Josef Albers (American born Germany, 1888-1976) Luminous Day 1947-1952 Oil on Masonite The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, Connecticut, 1976
Josef Albers (American born Germany, 1888-1976) Platform of the Eagles, Chichen Itza 1952 Gelatin silver print The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, Connecticut, 1976
The Heard Museum is presenting Josef Albers in Mexico. The exhibition demonstrates the influence and connectivity between the work of Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976) and the abstracted geometric vocabulary of pre-Columbian art, architecture and material culture. The Heard Museum is the third and final stop of the exhibition which opened in New York in 2017 then traveled to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in 2018.
Josef Albers in Mexico is organised by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and curated by Lauren Hinkson, Associate Curator of Collections at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Drawing from the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Josef Albers in Mexico presents an opportunity to learn about a little-known aspect of the artist’s practice and the influences he absorbed in his travels.
“Through his close attention to ancient architecture, Josef Albers developed new modes of seeing the modern world,” says Lauren Hinkson. “This exhibition of his celebrated paintings, along with lesser-known photographs and collages, reveals the complex and often surprising roles of place, time, and spirituality in Albers’s body of work.”
Included in the exhibition are rarely seen early paintings by Albers, including Homage to the Square and Variant / Adobe series, works on paper, and a rich selection of photographs and photocollages, many of which have never before been on view. The photographic works reveal a visual conversation Albers created in response to his frequent visits to Mexico to view archaeological sites as early as the 1930s, illustrating the nuanced relationship between the geometry and design elements of pre-Columbian monuments and the artist’s iconic abstract canvases and works on paper. Accompanying the artworks are a series of letters, personal photographs, studies and other ephemera.
The Heard also produced a series of public programs co-curated by the Heard Museum’s Fine Arts Curator, Erin Joyce. Topics include explorations of colour theory with some of todays’ leading artists, designers, and architects; the influence of Indigenous art and aesthetics on broader visual art, the role it has on informing artistic production and investigations into formalism and politics. Josef Albers in Mexico runs through Monday, May 27, 2019 at the Heard Museum.
Press release from the Heard Museum website [Online] Cited 25/02/2019
Josef Albers (American born Germany, 1888-1976) Mitla 1956 Gelatin silver prints and postcards, mounted to paperboard The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, Connecticut, 1976
Josef Albers (American born Germany, 1888-1976) Mitla (detail) 1956 Gelatin silver prints and postcards, mounted to paperboard The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, Connecticut, 1976
Josef Albers (American born Germany, 1888-1976) Mitla (detail) 1956 Gelatin silver prints and postcards, mounted to paperboard The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, Connecticut, 1976
Josef Albers (American born Germany, 1888-1976) Mitla (detail) 1956 Gelatin silver prints and postcards, mounted to paperboard The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, Connecticut, 1976
Josef Albers (American born Germany, 1888-1976) Mitla (detail) 1956 Gelatin silver prints and postcards, mounted to paperboard The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, Connecticut, 1976
Anni Albers (American born Germany, 1899-1994) Josef Albers, Mitla 1935-1939 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, Connecticut, 1976
Heard Museum 2301 N. Central Avenue Phoenix, Arizona 85004
Exhibition dates: 12th October, 2018 – 23rd April, 2019
Curators: Curated by Tracey Bashkoff, Director of Collections and Senior Curator, with the assistance of David Horowitz, Curatorial Assistant, and organised with the cooperation of the Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm.
Installation view of the exhibition Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, October 12, 2018 – April 23, 2019 Photo: David Heald
What can one say…
Magical, mystical, enchanted; chakra, mandala, golden ratio; music, spirit, energy.
Af Klint imagined displaying these works in a spiral temple, but the building never came to fruition. Now they are displayed in the spiral of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. I think she would have been very pleased.
She stipulated that her paintings not be shown for 20 years following her death, convinced the world was not ready for them. She was probably correct in that assumption. But now, now we are ravished by her creativity and prescience.
If she only knew how much she is now loved and adored. An enigmatic star that burns so very bright in the cosmos.
For Joyce Evans.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The exhibition Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future has attracted more than 600,000 visitors since its opening, making it the most-visited show in the history of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The survey of Hilma af Klint’s work is the first major solo exhibition in the United States devoted to the Swedish artist.
“For me, the 2018-19 art season will always belong to the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862-1944). I say this simply as a measure of the psychic and historical shift caused by the Guggenheim Museum’s extraordinary full-dress retrospective of her nearly 40-year career.”
Installation views of the exhibition Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, October 12, 2018 – April 23, 2019 Photos: David Heald
From October 12, 2018, to April 23, 2019, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents the first major solo exhibition in the United States of the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944). When af Klint began creating radically abstract paintings in 1906, they were like little that had been seen before: bold, colourful, and untethered from recognisable references to the physical world. It was several years before Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and others would take similar strides to free their own artwork of representational content. Yet af Klint rarely exhibited her remarkably forward-looking paintings and, convinced the world was not ready for them, stipulated that they not be shown for 20 years following her death. Ultimately, her work was not exhibited until 1986, and it is only over the past three decades that her paintings and works on paper have received serious attention.
Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future offers an opportunity to experience af Klint’s artistic achievements in the Guggenheim’s rotunda more than a century after she began her daring work. Curated by Tracey Bashkoff, Director of Collections and Senior Curator, with the assistance of David Horowitz, Curatorial Assistant, and organised with the cooperation of the Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm, the exhibition features more than 170 of af Klint’s artworks and focus on the artist’s breakthrough years, 1906-20. It is during this period that she began to produce nonobjective and stunningly imaginative paintings, creating a singular body of work that invites a reevaluation of modernism and its development.
Hilma af Klint was born in Stockholm in 1862 and went on to study painting at the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, graduating with honours in 1887. She soon established herself as a respected painter in Stockholm, exhibiting deftly rendered figurative paintings and serving briefly as secretary of the Society for Swedish Women Artists. During these years, she also became deeply engaged with spiritualism, Rosicrucianism, and Theosophy. These forms of spirituality, which were also of keen interest to other artists, including Kandinsky, FrantiÅ¡ek Kupka, Malevich, and Mondrian, were widely popular across Europe and the United States, as people sought to reconcile long-held religious beliefs with scientific advances and a new awareness of the global plurality of religions.
Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue representing her groundbreaking painting series while expanding recent scholarship to present the fullest picture yet of her life and art. Edited by Tracey Bashkoff, the volume includes contributions by Tessel M. Bauduin, Daniel Birnbaum, Briony Fer, Vivien Greene, Ylva Hillström, David Max Horowitz, Andrea Kollnitz, Helen Molesworth, and Julia Voss. Essays explore the social, intellectual, and artistic context of af Klint’s 1906 break with figuration and her subsequent development, placing her in the context of Swedish modernism and folk art traditions, contemporary scientific discoveries, and spiritualist and occult movements. A roundtable discussion among contemporary artists, scholars, and curators considers af Klint’s sources and relevance to art in the 21st century. The volume also delves into her unrealised plans for a spiral-shaped temple in which to display her art – a wish that finds a fortuitous answer in the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda, the site of the exhibition.
Press release from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum website [Online] Cited 11/03/2019
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![Unknown artist. '[Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits]' 1850s-1860s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/anon-collaged-portraits-f.jpg "Unknown artist. '[Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits]' 1850s-1860s")
![Unknown artist. '[Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits]' 1850s-1860s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/anon-collaged-portraits-g.jpg "Unknown artist. '[Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits]' 1850s-1860s")
![Unknown artist. '[Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits]' 1850s-1860s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/anon-collaged-portraits-h.jpg "Unknown artist. '[Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits]' 1850s-1860s")
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![Unknown artist (American) '[Boy Holding a Daguerreotype]' 1850s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/unknown-american-active-1850s-boy-holding-a-daguerreotype-1850s.jpg "Unknown artist (American) '[Boy Holding a Daguerreotype]' 1850s")
![Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916) '[California Oak, Santa Clara Valley]' c. 1863](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/watkins-california-oak-santa-clara-valley.jpg "Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916) '[California Oak, Santa Clara Valley]' c. 1863")
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